- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system.
- MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together about how to install and configure things. Probably would have eased the tradition to mobile. A version was actually shipped to developers, but it had to be covered up to justify the bailout of Next by Apple to get Steve Jobs.
- Transaction processing operating systems. The first one was IBM's Customer Information Control System. A transaction processor is a kind of OS where everything is like a CGI program - load program, do something, exit program. Unix and Linux are, underneath, terminal oriented time sharing systems.
- IBM MicroChannel. Early minicomputer and microcomputer designers thought "bus", where peripherals can talk to memory and peripherals look like memory to the CPU. Mainframes, though, had "channels", simple processors which connected peripherals to the CPU. Channels could run simple channel programs, and managed device access to memory. IBM tried to introduce that with the PS2, but they made it proprietary and that failed in the marketplace. Today, everything has something like channels, but they're not a unified interface concept that simplifies the OS.
- CPUs that really hypervise properly. That is, virtual execution environments look just like real ones.
IBM did that in VM, and it worked well because channels are a good abstraction for both a real machine and a VM. Storing into device registers to make things happen is not. x86 has added several layers below the "real machine" layer, and they're all hacks.
- The Motorola 680x0 series. Should have been the foundation of the microcomputer era, but it took way too long to get the MMU out the door. The original 68000 came out in 1978, but then Motorola fell behind.
- Modula. Modula 2 and 3 were reasonably good languages. Oberon was a flop. DEC was into Modula, but Modula went down with DEC.
- XHTML. Have you ever read the parsing rules for HTML 5, where the semantics for bad HTML were formalized? Browsers should just punt at the first error, display an error message, and render the rest of the page in Times Roman.
Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly?
- Word Lens. Look at the world through your phone, and text is translated, standalone, on the device. No Internet connection required. Killed by Google in favor of hosted Google Translate.
jasode 46 minutes ago [-]
>- XHTML. [...] Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly?
XHTML appeals to the intuition that there should be a Strict Right Way To Do Things ... but you can't use that unforgiving framework for web documents that are widely shared.
The "real world" has 2 types of file formats:
(1) file types where consumers cannot contact/control/punish the authors (open-loop) : HTML, pdf, zip, csv, etc. The common theme is that the data itself is more important that the file format. That's why Adobe Reader will read malformed pdf files written by buggy PDF libraries. And both 7-Zip and Winrar can read malformed zip files with broken headers (because some old Java libraries wrote bad zip files). MS Excel can import malformed csv files. E.g. the Citi bank export to csv wrote a malformed file and it was desirable that MS Excel imported it anyway because the raw data of dollar amounts was more important than the incorrect commas in the csv file -- and -- I have no way of contacting the programmer at Citi to tell them to fix their buggy code that created the bad csv file.
(2) file types where the consumer can control the author (closed-loop): programming language source code like .c, .java, etc or business interchange documents like EDI. There's no need to have a "lenient forgiving" gcc/clang compiler to parse ".c" source code because the "consumer-and-author" will be the same person. I.e. the developer sees the compiler stop at a syntax error and then fix it and try to re-compile. For business interchange formats like EDI, a company like Walmart can tell the vendor to fix their broken EDI files.
XHTML wants to be in group (2) but web surfers can't control all the authors of .html so that's why lenient parsing of HTML "wins". XHTML would work better in a "closed-loop" environment such as a company writing internal documentation for its employees. E.g. an employee handbook can be written in strict XHTML because both the consumers and authors work at the same company. E.g. can't see the vacation policy because the XHTML syntax is wrong?!? Get on the Slack channel and tell the programmer or content author to fix it.
JimDabell 3 hours ago [-]
> - XHTML. Have you ever read the parsing rules for HTML 5, where the semantics for bad HTML were formalized? Browsers should just punt at the first error, display an error message, and render the rest of the page in Times Roman. Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly?
We stop at the first sign of trouble for almost every other format, we do not need lax parsing for HTML. This has caused a multitude of security vulnerabilities and only makes it more difficult for pretty much everybody.
The attitude towards HTML5 parsing seemed to grow out of this weird contrarianism that everybody who wanted to do better than whatever Internet Explorer did had their head in the clouds and that the role of a standard was just to write down all the bugs.
Oscar_Hall 1 hours ago [-]
The attitude towards HTML5 parsing seemed to grow out of this weird contrarianism that everybody who wanted to do better than whatever Internet Explorer did had their head in the clouds and that the role of a standard was just to write down all the bugs.
Timwi 18 minutes ago [-]
The reason XHTML failed is because the spec required it to be sent with a new MIME type (application/xml+xhtml I believe) which no webserver did out of the box. Everything defaulted to text/html, which all browsers would interpret as HTML, and given the mismatching doctype, would interpret as tag soup (quirks mode/lenient).
Meanwhile, local files with the .xhtml extension would be treated as XHTML. So everyone who tried to use XHTML didn't realize that it would go back to being read as HTML when they upload it to their webserver/return it from PHP/etc. Then, when something went wrong/worked differently than expected, the author would blame XHTML.
archargelod 1 hours ago [-]
> Modula. Modula 2 and 3 were reasonably good languages. Oberon was a flop. DEC was into Modula, but Modula went down with DEC.
If you appreciate Modula's design, take a look at Nim[1].
I remember reading the Wikipedia page for Modula-3[2] and thinking "huh, that's just like Nim" in every other section.
- I think without the move to NeXT, even if Jobs had come back to Apple, they would never have been able to get to the iPhone. iOS was - and still is - a unix-like OS, using unix-like philosophy, and I think that philosophy allowed them to build something game-changing compared to the SOTA in mobile OS technology at the time. So much so, Android follows suit. It doesn't have a command line, and installation is fine, so I'm not sure your line of reasoning holds strongly. One thing I think you might be hinting at though that is a missed trick: macOS today could learn a little from the way iOS and iPadOS is forced to do things and centralise configuration in a single place.
- I think transaction processing operating systems have been reinvented today as "serverless". The load/execute/quit cycle you describe is how you build in AWS Lambdas, GCP Cloud Run Functions or Azure Functions.
- Most of your other ideas (with an exception, see below), died either because of people trying to grab money rather than build cool tech, and arguably the free market decided to vote with its feet - I do wonder when we might next get a major change in hardware architectures again though, it does feel like we've now got "x86" and "ARM" and that's that for the next generation.
- XHTML died because it was too hard for people to get stuff done. The forgiving nature of the HTML specs is a feature, not a bug. We shouldn't expect people to be experts at reading specs to publish on the web, nor should it need special software that gatekeeps the web. It needs to be scrappy, and messy and evolutionary, because it is a technology that serves people - we don't want people to serve the technology.
donatj 52 minutes ago [-]
On XHTML, I think there was room for both HTML and a proper XHTML that barks on errors. If you're a human typing HTML or using a language where you build your HTML by concatenation like early PHP, sure it makes sense to allow loosey goosey HTML but if you're using any sort of simple DOM builder which should preclude you from the possibility of outputting invalid HTML, strict XHTML makes a lot more sense.
Honestly I'm disappointed the promised XHTML5 never materialized along side HTML5. I guess it just lost steam.
eterm 3 hours ago [-]
> Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly
It would kill the approachability of the language.
One of the joys of learning HTML when it tended to be hand-written was that if you made a mistake, you'd still see something just with distorted output.
That was a lot more approachable for a lot of people who were put off "real" programming languages because they were overwhelmed by terrible error messages any time they missed a bracket or misspelled something.
If you've learned to program in the last decade or two, you might not even realise just how bad compiler errors tended to be in most languages.
The kind of thing where you could miss a bracket on line 47 but end up with a compiler error complaining about something 20 lines away.
Rust ( in particular ) got everyone to bring up their game with respect to meaningful compiler errors.
But in the days of XHTML? Error messages were arcane, you had to dive in to see what the problem actually was.
bazoom42 2 hours ago [-]
If you forget a closing quote on an attribute in html, all content until next quote is ignored and not rendered - even if it is the rest of the page. I dont think this is more helpful than an error message. It was just simpler to implement.
Error Line 22, Column 4: end tag for "b" omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified
What is line 22?
</p>
It's up to you to go hunting back through the document, to find the un-closed 'b' tag.
Back in the day, the error messages were even more misleading than this, often talking about "Extra content at end of document" or similar.
Compare that to the very visual feedback of putting this exact document into a browser.
You get more bold text than you were expecting, the bold just runs into the next text.
That's a world of difference, especially for people who prefer visual feedback to reading and understanding errors in text form.
Try it for yourself, save this document to a .html file and put it through the XHTML validator.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<?xml-stylesheet href="http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/TR/W3C-WD.css" type="text/css"?>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<title>test XHTML 1.0 Strict document</title>
<link rev="made" href="mailto:gerald@w3.org" />
</head>
<body>
<p>
This is a test XHTML 1.0 Strict document.
</p>
<p>
See: <a href="./">W3C Markup Validation Service: Tests</a>
<b>huh
Well, isn't that good
</p>
<hr />
<address>
<a href="https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=referer">valid HTML</a><br />
<a href="../../feedback.html">Gerald Oskoboiny</a>
</address>
</body>
</html>
bazoom42 2 hours ago [-]
> Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly?
Probably not, but what would be the benefit of having more pages fail to render? If xhtml had been coupled with some cool features which only worked in xhtml mode, it might have become successful, but on its own it does not provide much value.
defanor 2 hours ago [-]
> but what would be the benefit of having more pages fail to render?
I think those benefits are quite similar to having more programs failing to run (due to static and strong typing, other static analysis, and/or elimination of undefined behavior, for instance), or more data failing to be read (due to integrity checks and simply strict parsing): as a user, you get documents closer to valid ones (at least in the rough format), if anything at all, and additionally that discourages developers from shipping a mess. Then parsers (not just those in viewers, but anything that does processing) have a better chance to read and interpret those documents consistently, so even more things work predictably.
bazoom42 2 hours ago [-]
Sure, authoring tools should help authors avoid mistakes and produce valid content. But the browser is a tool for the consumer of content, and there is no benefit for the user if it fails to to render some existing pages.
It is like Windows jumping through hoops to support backwards compatibility even with buggy software. The interest of the customer is that the software runs.
thangalin 2 hours ago [-]
XHTML is XML. XML-based markup for content can be typeset into PDF, suitable for print media. I invite you to check out the PDFs listed in the intro to my feature matrix comparison page, all being sourced from XHTML:
Adobe Flash / Shockwave. After all these decades, I've yet to see a tool that makes it as easy to make games or multimedia as Flash did. One of many reminders recently (many others in politics) that humanity doesn't just inevitably or linearly move forward in any domain, or even 2 steps forward 1 step back. Some things are just lost to time - maybe rediscovered in a century, maybe never.
neya 1 hours ago [-]
Even if Adobe had gotten their act together and fixed all security holes, Apple would have still killed it. It was always a threat as a popular design tool. And decades later, with the HTML canvas hype faded, there's still no replacement to what Adobe Flash could do - any designer could create stellar, interactive design that can be embedded into any website...without a monthly subscription.
donatj 49 minutes ago [-]
Personal pet peeve, but as someone who still makes gifs, Image Ready. Adobe kind of absorbed Image Ready into Photoshop and it's just never lived up to how easy it was to make simple gifs in Image Ready
watwut 2 hours ago [-]
Yes. I never used flash personally, but I loved those little games people created with them. There was the whole scene of non developers creating little games of all kinds and it just ceased to exist.
Imustaskforhelp 21 minutes ago [-]
There is still a way to run flash apps via https://ruffle.rs/
You can probably still make flash games and run them via ruffle.
portaouflop 22 minutes ago [-]
Kids now create games in Roblox.
More constrained, more commercial, more exploitative- but there is still a huge scene of non-developers creating games if you care to look.
rkomorn 2 hours ago [-]
So much college years time spent (wasted?) on Addicting Games.
Y-bar 2 hours ago [-]
Those tools were awesome. But as formats go, they were awful due to bad performance and more security holes than anything else.
I still miss Macromedia Fireworks.
GuB-42 33 minutes ago [-]
Performance was way better than what we have now with modern web stacks, we just have more powerful computers.
I agree on security and bugs, but bugs can be fixed. It just shows neglect by Adobe, which was, I think, the real problem. I think that if Adobe seriously wanted to, it could have been a web standard.
OtherShrezzing 2 hours ago [-]
Macromedia Fireworks was an outstanding piece of software.
The 20 most common things you’d do with the tool were there for you in obvious toolbars. It had a lot of advanced features for image editing. It had a scripting language, so you could do bulk editing operations. It supported just about every file extension you could think of.
Most useful feature of all was that it’d load instantly. You’d click the icon on the desktop, and there’d be the Fireworks UI before you could finish blinking. Compared to 2025 Adobe apps, where you click the desktop icon and make a coffee while it starts, it’s phenomenal performance.
Sankozi 2 hours ago [-]
Flash performance is still better than current web stack's. Probably will always be - you could write non trivial games that would work on 128MB memory machine. Currently single browser tab with simple page can take more than that.
smokel 4 minutes ago [-]
The TUNES [1] operating system and programming language project.
The reason for its failure are described perfectly on the archival website:
> TUNES started in 1992-95 as an operating system project, but was never clearly defined, and it succumbed to design-by-committee syndrome and gradually failed. Compared to typical OS projects it had very ambitious goals, which you may find interesting.
Edit: you asked why. I first saw it at SELF where Chris DiBona showed it to me and a close friend. It was awesome. Real time translation, integration of various types of messaging, tons of cool capabilities, and it was fully open source. What made it out of Google was a stripped down version of what I was shown, the market rejected it, and it was a sad day. Now, I am left with JIRA, Slack, and email. It sucks.
socalgal2 7 hours ago [-]
I was blown away by the demo but then after I thought about it, it seemed like a nightmare to me. All the problems of slack of having to manually check channels for updates except X 100 (yea, I get that slack wasn't available then. My point is I saw that it seemed impossible to keep up with nested constantly updated hierarchical threads. Keeping up with channels on slack is bad enough so imagine if Wave had succeeded. It'd be even worse.
prisenco 4 hours ago [-]
Wave was great for conversation with one or two other people on a specific project, which I'm sure most people here used it for. I can't imagine it scaling well beyond that.
LargoLasskhyfv 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe one could have worked around that by embedding Yahoo Pipes, thus automating the X 100.
aftergibson 1 hours ago [-]
I managed trips with friends and it was a great form factor for ad-hoc discussions with docs and links included. I thought it was the future and in my very early programming days wrote probably the most insecure plugin ever to manage your servers.
It's been 16 years. I should probably archive this..
mikewarot 2 hours ago [-]
Google wave was built on an awesome technology layer, and they they totally blew in on the user interface.... deciding to treat it as a set of separate items instead of a single document everyone everywhere all at once could edit.... killed it.
It make it seem needlessly complicated, and effectively erased all the positives.
vendiddy 2 hours ago [-]
I think this is spot on.
A document metaphor would have made a Wave a lot easier to understand.
feketegy 2 hours ago [-]
Google Wave was way ahead of its time.
brap 2 hours ago [-]
Google Wave had awesome tech but if you look at the demo in hindsight you can tell it’s just not a very good product. They tried making an all-in-one kind of product which just doesn’t work.
In a sense Wave still exists but was split into multiple products, so I wouldn’t say it’s “dead”. The tech that powered it is still used today in many of Google’s popular products. It turns out that having separate interfaces for separate purposes is just more user friendly than an all-in-one.
edanm 6 hours ago [-]
Immediately thought of this.
Even the watered-down version of wave was something I used at my host startup, it was effectively our project management tool. And it was amazing at that.
I don't know how it would fare compared to the options available today, but back then, it shutting down was a tremendous loss.
drnick1 7 hours ago [-]
Isn't Nextcloud (including Nextcloud Talk) a viable alternative? Certainly, something like Discord (centralized and closed source) isn't.
spooky_deep 3 hours ago [-]
Is there a video or anything of this version of Wave?
jwpapi 7 hours ago [-]
Discord is function wise the best now...
portaouflop 19 minutes ago [-]
I don’t get the downvotes.
Discord for all its flaws is amazing.
I never experienced wave so maybe the comparison is not a good one?
progval 3 minutes ago [-]
It's indeed not a good one. Discord refined instant messaging and bolts other things on top like forums but isn't fundamentally different. Google Wave was (and still is) a completely different paradigm. Everything was natively collaborative: it mixed instant messaging with document edition (like Google Docs or pads) and any widget you could think of (polls, calendars, playing music, drawing, ...) could be added by users through sandboxed Javascript. The current closest I can think of is DeltaChat's webxdc.
bdangubic 7 hours ago [-]
wave was fucking amazing. buggy but amazing
burnt-resistor 7 hours ago [-]
Google sucked/s at executive function because they completely lack appreciation for proper R&D and long-term investment and also kill things people use and love.
smrtinsert 5 hours ago [-]
Honestly a lot of the time they seem to be be in "what do humans want?" mode.
w10-1 5 hours ago [-]
Optane persistent memory had a fascinating value proposition: stop converting data structures for database storage and just persist the data directly. No more booting or application launch or data load: just pick up where you left off. Died because it was too expensive, but probably long after it should have.
VM's persist memory snapshots (as do Apple's containers, for macOS at least), so there's still room for something like that workflow.
Findecanor 52 minutes ago [-]
Systems are stuck in old ways in how they model storage, so they weren't ready for something that is neither really RAM nor disk.
Optane did inspire quite a few research projects for a while though. A few applications emerged in the server space, in particular.
Gud 4 hours ago [-]
1+ for 3dxpoint.
The technology took decades to mature, but the business people didn’t have the patience to let the world catch up to this revolutionary technology.
dlcarrier 3 hours ago [-]
The world had already caught up. By the time it was released, flash memory was already nearing it's speed and latency, to the point that the difference want with the cost.
Havoc 1 hours ago [-]
>flash memory was already nearing it's speed and latency
Kinda, but for small writes it's still nowhere near.
Samsung 990 Pro - IOPS 4KQD1 113 MBytes/Sec
P4800X optane - IOPS 4KQD1 206 MBytes/Sec
And that's a device 5 years newer and on a faster pcie generation.
It disappeared because the market that values above attribute is too small and its hard to market because at first glance they look about the same on a lot of metrics as you say
tester756 3 hours ago [-]
Optane was impressive from tech standpoint.
We were about get rid of split between RAM and disk memory and use single stick for both!
veqq 4 hours ago [-]
I have an optane drive with the kernel on it, instant boot!
stanac 2 hours ago [-]
How does that work? It loads kernel from drive to ram?
Isn't windows fast boot something like that (only slower, depending on ssd)? It semi-hibernates, stores kernel part of memory on disk for faster startup.
goku12 1 hours ago [-]
This one would have behaved more like suspend to RAM. In suspend to RAM, the RAM is kept powered, while everything else is shut down. The recovery would be near instant, since all the execution contexts are preserved on the RAM.
Optane was nearly as fast as RAM, but also persistent like a storage device. So you do a suspend to RAM, without the requirement to keep it powered like a RAM.
LargoLasskhyfv 2 hours ago [-]
Not only because of price. The 'ecosystem' infrastructure wasn't there, or at least not spread wide enough. The 'mindshare'/thinking of ways how to do, neither. This is more aligned with (live) 'image-based' working environments like early Lisp and Smalltalk systems. Look at where they are now...
A few more thoughts about that, since I happen to have some of the last systems who actually had systems level support for that in their firmware, and early low-capacity optanes designed for that sort of use. It's fascinating to play with these, but they are low capacity, and bound to obsolete operating systems.
Given enough RAM, you can emulate that with working suspend and resume to/and from RAM.
Another avenue are the ever faster and larger SSDs, in practice, with some models it makes almost no difference anymore, since random access times are so fast, and transfer speeds insane. Maybe total and/or daily TBW remains a concern.
Both of these can be combined.
bxparks 11 hours ago [-]
A lot of things on https://killedbygoogle.com/ . I used to use 30-40 Google products and services. I'm down to 3-4.
Google Picasa: Everything local, so fast, so good. I'm never going to give my photos to G Photos.
Google Hangouts: Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps. I use Signal now.
Google G Suite Legacy: It was supposed to be free forever. They killed it, tried to make me pay. I migrated out of Google.
Google Play Music: I had uploaded thousands of MP3 files there. They killed it. I won't waste my time uploading again.
Google Finance: Tracked my stocks and funds there. Then they killed it. Won't trust them with my data again.
Google NFC Wallet: They killed it. Then Apple launched the same thing, and took over.
Google Chromecast Audio: It did one thing, which is all I needed. Sold mine as soon as they announced they were killing it.
Google Chromecast: Wait, they killed Chromecast? I did not know that until I started writing this..
brandonb927 10 hours ago [-]
Google Reader: I will forever be salty about how Google killed something that likely required very little maintenance in the long run. It could have stayed exactly the same for a decade and I wouldn't have cared because I use an RSS reader exactly the same way I do that I did back in 2015.
nine_k 6 hours ago [-]
Yes. That was the single worst business decision in Google history, as somebody correctly noted. It burned an enormous amount of goodwill for no gain whatsoever.
Killing Google Reader affected a relatively small number of users, but these users disporportionately happened to be founders, CTOs, VPs of engineering, social media luminaries, and people who eventually became founders, CTOs, etc. They had been painfully taught to not trust Google, and, since that time, they didn't. And still don't.
perardi 5 hours ago [-]
Just think of the data mining they could have had there.
They had a core set of ultra-connected users who touched key aspects of the entire tech industry. The knowledge graph you could have built out of what those people read and shared…
They could have just kept the entire service running with, what, 2 software engineers? Such a waste.
nine_k 4 hours ago [-]
This would require the decision-maker to think and act at the scale and in interests of the entire company. Not at the scale of a promo packet for next perf: "saved several millions in operation costs by shutting down a low-impact, unprofitable service."
benjaminwootton 2 hours ago [-]
There is some truth in this. I fit into a few of these buckets and I don’t think I could ever recommend their enterprise stuff after having my favourite consumer products pulled.
electroglyph 18 minutes ago [-]
Google G Suite offered a free option after initially saying it was ending. just logged into my Workspace account: https://ibb.co/99jBLJnD
still have many domains on there, all with gmail
huhkerrf 4 hours ago [-]
> Google Play Music: I had uploaded thousands of MP3 files there. They killed it. I won't waste my time uploading again.
You can argue whether it's as good as GPM or not, but it's false to imply that your uploaded music disappeared when Google moved to YouTube Music. I made the transition, and all of my music moved without a new upload.
shakna 4 hours ago [-]
You made the transition, under differing licensing terms. Not always an option.
dwayne_dibley 4 hours ago [-]
I still use PICASA it works fine. However, when google severed the gdrive-photo linking it meant my photos didn’t automatically download from google to my PC. This is what killed google for me.
NoahZuniga 14 minutes ago [-]
Google finance was never killed by google?
mikewarot 2 hours ago [-]
Picasa was awesome, they had face recognition years before almost everything else, in a nice offline package.
Unfortunately the last public version has a bug that randomly swaps face tags, so you end up training on the wrong persons faces just enough to throw it all off, and the recognition becomes effectively worthless on thousands of family photos. 8(
Digikam is a weak sauce replacement that barely gets the job done.
tdeck 7 hours ago [-]
I'm still amused that they killed Google Notebook and then a few years later created Google Keep, an application with basically the same exact feature set.
TheCapeGreek 5 hours ago [-]
You can say that for a fair few of the services mentioned by GP.
Google killed a lot of things to consolidate them into more "integrated" (from their perspective) product offerings. Picasa -> Photos, Hangounts -> Meet, Music -> YT Premium.
No idea what NFC Wallet was, other than the Wallet app on my phone that still exists and works?
The only one I'm not sure about is Chromecast - a while back my ones had an "update" to start using their newer AI Assistant system for managing it. Still works.
nja 8 hours ago [-]
Chromecast Audio still works! They just don't sell them anymore. I use mine every day, and have been keeping an eye out for anyone selling theirs...
bxparks 7 hours ago [-]
Hmm, good to know. But given Google's history, I assumed that it would stop working.
I also need to sell my Google Chromecast with Google TV 4K. Brand new, still in its shrink wrap. Bought it last year, to replace a flaky Roku. It was a flaky HDMI cable instead. I trust Roku more than Google for hardware support.
lexicality 2 hours ago [-]
In absolutely shocking news, it did stop working and then Google went out of their way to fix it.
I genuinely thought all the chromecast audios I owned were useless bricks and was looking around for replacements and then they just started working again from an OTA update. Astounding. I assume someone got fired for taking time away from making search worse to do this.
Of course another question how long they will honor that commitment.
bigthymer 7 hours ago [-]
I'm still upset that Google Maps no longer tracks my location. It was very useful to be able to go back and see how often and where I had gone.
Is there another app where I can store this locally?
forever_frey 9 minutes ago [-]
Check out Dawarich, it has an official iOS app and you can use a number of 3rd party mobile apps to track your data and then upload it to server: either ran on your own hardware (FOSS self-hosted) or to the Dawarich Cloud one: https://dawarich.app
Using it on daily basis
socalgal2 7 hours ago [-]
Google Maps still tracks my location.
The difference is they no longer store the data on their servers, it's stored on your phone (iPhone/Android)
That way, they can't respond to requests for that data by governments as they don't have it.
I can look on my phone and see all the places I've been today/yesterday, etc
serial_dev 1 hours ago [-]
I heard about dawarich, open source, didn’t have time to try it though or check the details... https://dawarich.app/
bapak 5 hours ago [-]
Arc and its free Arc Mini companion. iOS. Been using it since Facebook eclipsed Moves app. A decade later, it's still not as good as Moves.
sameline 7 hours ago [-]
Apple Maps added a Visited Places (beta) feature recently.
bxparks 7 hours ago [-]
Strava? :-) Half-joking, half-serious, I haven't used Strava in years, I don't remember all its capabilities.
Edit: Missed the "locally" part. Sorry no suggestions. Maybe Garmin has something?
iamacyborg 3 hours ago [-]
Nope, Garmin only tracks your location when you record an activity that uses gps, which is good, frankly.
daxfohl 8 hours ago [-]
Google Search: Not officially dead yet, but....
bdangubic 7 hours ago [-]
yup, losing 0.000087% year-over-year so in 865 billion years it’ll be dead :)
bxparks 7 hours ago [-]
That was probably me, when I stopped using Google Search some years ago. :-) Got tired of the ads, the blog spam, and AI-generated content crap floating to the top of their results page.
marttt 6 hours ago [-]
The https://udm14.com/ flavor of Google is quite usable, though, esp with notable operators like inurl:this-or-that. But, all in all, yeah, gimme back vanilla Google search from 2008-2010 or so. Back then it was definitely a tool (I worked in investigative journalism at the time), whereas currently "searching" stands for sitting fingers crossed and hoping for the better. But, oh well. </rant>
daxfohl 6 hours ago [-]
That's more what I meant. Sure, lots of people still type stuff into the URL bar that takes them to www.google.com/search. But whatever you want to call that results page now, it's no longer Google Search in anything but name.
tomComb 8 hours ago [-]
I’m still using
- free g suite
- play music
- finance
- nfc wallet is just google wallet isn’t it?
- chromecast, video and audio-only
I guess play music is now YouTube music, and doesn't have uploads, so that can be considered dead, but the others seem alive to me.
Immich is a great replacement for Google Photos, if maybe not Picasa.
socalgal2 7 hours ago [-]
I used Picasa and loved it, until I realized I want all my photos available from all my devices at all times and so gave in to Google Photos (for access, not backup)
bxparks 7 hours ago [-]
I use SyncThing for that purpose. It syncs across my phone, my laptops, and my Synologies. But I don't sync all my photos.
I don't like the thought of providing Google thousands of personal photos for their AI training. Which will eventually leak to gov't agencies, fraudsters, and criminals.
andsoitis 5 hours ago [-]
Why did you keep on using so many Google products if those products get cancelled?
Why didn’t you quit Google after, say, the third product you used got canned?
dlcarrier 4 hours ago [-]
I used Google Talk than Hangouts, but once they switched to Meet, I gave up on them. By then my family was all using Hangouts, and we never settled on a new service, because one of my siblings didn't want to support any chat services that don't freely give user information to the government, and the rest of us didn't want to use a chat platform that does freely give user information to the government.
serial_dev 1 hours ago [-]
Am I the only one salty about Google Podcasts? For me that was the straw that broke the camel’s back… I dropped Android, switched to iOS, and slowly phasing out the Google products in my life.
hshdhdhj4444 4 hours ago [-]
Google Desktop Search (and also the Search Appliance if you were an SMB).
hshdhdhj4444 4 hours ago [-]
I think Chromecast has been replaced by Google TV which is a souped up Chromecast.
dheera 7 hours ago [-]
Isn't it "Google TV Streamer" now?
bxparks 7 hours ago [-]
From what I can tell (since I am just finding out about this today), they stopped manufacturing the old Chromecast hardware, and at some point, will stop supporting the old devices. The old devices may stop working in the future, for example, because they sunset the servers. Like their thermostats. Who knows?
dheera 6 hours ago [-]
I wish there was some law that requires open-sourcing firmware and flashing tools if a company decides to EOL a product ...
nine_k 6 hours ago [-]
Picasa definitely went against the grain of Google, which is all about tying you to online services.
Hangouts had trouble scaling to many participants. Google Meet is fine, and better than e.g. MS Teams.
Legacy suite, free forever? Did they also promise a pony?..
Play Music: music is a legal minefield. Don't trust anybody commercial who suggests you upload music you did not write yourself.
Finance: IDK, I still get notifications about the stocks I'm interested in.
NFC Wallet: alive and kicking, I use it literally every day to pay for subway.
Can't say anything about Chromecast. I have a handful of ancient Chromecasts that work. I don't want any updates for them.
coreyhn 7 hours ago [-]
Yahoo pipes. It was so great at creating rss feeds and custom workflows. There are replacements now like Zapier and n8n but loved that. Also google reader which is mentioned multiple times already.
Fuzzwah 2 hours ago [-]
I loved pipes. I had rss feeds from all the sites where I was sharing content collected up and formatted via pipes into a single rss feed that was pulled into a php blog.
Then all those sites I used to post on stopped supporting rss one by one and finally pipes was killed off.
For a while I used a python library called riko that did the same thing as pipes without the visual editor. I have to thank it for getting me off php and into python.
If anyone with time, money and resources wants to revive the ideas of Yahoo! Pipes then I would suggest using Node-RED[^1] as a good starting point.
It has the advantage of being open source, has well defined and stable APIs and a solid backend. Plus 10+ years of constant development with many learnings around how to implement flow based programming visually.
I used the Node-RED frontend to create Browser-Red[^2] which is a Node-RED that solely executes in the browser, no server required. It does not support all Node-RED functionality but gives a good feel for using Node-RED and flow based programming.
The second project with which I am using Node-RED frontend is Erlang-Red[^3] which is Node-RED with an Erlang backend. Erlang is better suited to flow based programming than NodeJS, hence this attempt to demonstrate that!
Node-RED makes slightly different assumptions than Yahoo! Pipes - input ports being the biggest: all nodes in Node-RED have either zero or one input wires, nodes in Yahoo! Pipes had multiple input wires.
A good knowledge of jQuery is required but that makes it simpler to get into the frontend code - would be my argument ;) I am happy to answer questions related to Node-RED, email in bio.
I can recommend Apache Camel (https://camel.apache.org) for similar data integration pipelines and even agentic workflows. There are even visual editors for Camel today, which IMHO make it extremely user friendly to build any kind of pipeline quickly.
Yahoo Pipes was what internet should have been. We're so many decades into computing and that kind of inter-tool linking has only barely been matched by unix pipes.
viraptor 2 hours ago [-]
Many companies are working very hard to make that impossible unfortunately. For example you can't get posts from public Facebook groups automatically, although that would be a really good source candidate. They used to allow it, but... not anymore.
_kidlike 5 hours ago [-]
hey, but we got MCP...
benrutter 6 hours ago [-]
I never used it, but Yahoo pipes sounds like it was awesome whenever I hear people talk about it.
I don't know if it was Yahoo Pipes that died, or a mainstream internet based on open protocols and standards.
Havoc 1 hours ago [-]
It died because it was basically a cool hobby tech demo that happened to be on yahoo domain. There was never any real tie in to yahoo the company
pyromaker 2 hours ago [-]
I missed Yahoo Pipes a lot so I built something similar recently for myself :) I know there are a few alternatives out there, but had to scratch my own itch.
Sandstorm: it seemed quite nice with a lot of possibilities when it launched in 2014, but it didn’t really take off and then it moved to sandstorm.org.
Sandstorm was a great idea, but in my opinion it was targeted wrong. It should have been a platform and marketplace for B2B SaaS, not B2C SaaS. Specifically, all the third-party services which typical web apps use could have been Sandstorm apps, like analytics, logging, email, customer service etc.
goku12 1 hours ago [-]
The actual problem with Sandstorm wasn't the era in which it was released. It will probably have the same problems even if released today. The problem was its application isolation mechanism - especially the data isolation (I think they were called grains). The mechanism is technically brilliant. But it's a big departure from how apps are developed today. It means that you have to do non-trivial modifications to web applications before they can run on the platform. The platform is better for applications designed to run on it in the start. It should have been marketed as a platform for building web applications, rather than as one for just deploying them.
donatj 35 minutes ago [-]
Quartz Composer - Apple's "patch-based" visual programming environment. Drag out a bunch of nodes, wire them together, build a neat little GUI.
10+ years ago I'd regularly build all sorts of little utilities with it. It was surprisingly easy to use it to tap into things that are otherwise a lot more work. For instance I used it to monitor the data coming from a USB device. Like 3 nodes and 3 patches to make all of that work. Working little GUI app in seconds.
Apple hasn't touched it since 2016, I kind of hope it makes a comeback given Blender and more so Unreal Engine giving people a taste of the node based visual programming life.
You can still download it from Apple, and it still technically works but a lot of the most powerful nodes are broken in the newer OS's. I'd love to see the whole thing revitalized.
Havoc 53 minutes ago [-]
Pascal/Delphi - especially in the educational context.
Crazy fast compiler so doesn't frustrate trial & erroring students, decent type system without the wildness of say rust and all the basic programming building blocks you want students to grasp are present without language specific funkiness.
I was a hold out on smartphones for a while and I used to print out k5 articles to read while afk... Just such an amazing collection of people sharing ideas and communal moderation, editing and up voting.
I learned about so many wierd and wonderful things from that site.
MilanTodorovic 2 hours ago [-]
Are there any spiritual successors?
haunter 11 hours ago [-]
Vine. It was already pretty big back in 2013
but
Twitter had no idea what to do with it. TikTok actually launched just a few months before Vine was shut down and erased from the internet.
bapak 5 hours ago [-]
Whoever took the decision to kill Vine was an absolute moron, even without hindsight. It was square videos, how hard could it have been to shove an ads banner above it and call it a day? Incredible
saurik 5 hours ago [-]
They also killed Periscope right as the explosion of streaming online video happened... Twitter has always been pretty incompetent.
geor9e 11 hours ago [-]
I will never forgive twitter for this catch and kill of a platform so full of life
burnt-resistor 7 hours ago [-]
Perhaps because they already had Periscope that no one used. It was a "buy competitor to kill it" play that didn't have the desired effect.
tdeck 7 hours ago [-]
Amusingly Periscope was their clone of Meerkat which was briefly popular before they killed it.
joshdavham 11 hours ago [-]
I've thought about this too. Imagine all the drama the US government could've avoided if Vine had won over TikTok!
lazyasciiart 8 hours ago [-]
With Elon running it? He probably would have actively sold it to china.
geoffpado 7 hours ago [-]
In a world where Vine is as successful as TikTok ended up being, who’s to say they get to a point where selling to Musk even happens?
quinndexter 26 minutes ago [-]
guys when you invent fictional alternate realities, you're allowed to leave people out of them completely. Anyone you like.
dannyobrien 11 hours ago [-]
Midori, Microsoft's capability-based security OS[1]. Rumor has it that it was getting to the point where it was able to run Windows code, so it was killed through internal politics, but who knows! It was the Fuchsia of its time...
I've heard someone at Microsoft describe it as a moonshot but also a retention project; IIRC it had a hundred plus engineers on it at one time, including a lot of very senior people.
Apparently a bunch of research from Midori made it into .NET so it wasn't all lost, but still...
sauercrowd 3 hours ago [-]
> retention project
Never heard this phrase before, but I can definitely see this happening at companies of that size
drnick1 7 hours ago [-]
The technical foundation seems interesting, but knowing Microsoft this would have just become yet another bloated mess with it's own new set of problems. And by now it would have equally become filled with spyware and AI "features" users don't want.
alance 2 hours ago [-]
I liked del.icio.us, it was online bookmark sharing, but with actual people I knew, and it had genuinely useful category tagging. I guess it was basically replaced with https://old.reddit.com and maybe twitter.
dewey 2 hours ago [-]
Isn’t Pinboard (Who bought delicious) very similar? I also see bookmarks of my friend there, recently switched to Raindrop though as it’s much more maintained.
youngtaff 17 minutes ago [-]
it is but people are switching away due to lack of maintenance and the founders political views
Towaway69 6 hours ago [-]
The information superhighway
The internet before advertising, artificial intelligence, social media and bots. When folks created startups in their bedrooms or garages. The days when google slogan was “don’t be evil”.
feketegy 2 hours ago [-]
That part of the Internet still exists, it's just nobody visits those sites anymore.
Communities are moving back to early Internet-like chatrooms like IRC, but now it is Slack, Discord, and the like. Everything private.
donatj 8 minutes ago [-]
I really miss the like 8 year ago push where a lot of major projects were moving to IRC. It's too bad Freenode took the opportunity to jump the shark and killed the momentum.
dannersy 57 minutes ago [-]
I mean, they're intentionally buried in the name of capital. If you need more than a Google search to find them, of course no one will go to them.
I don't like the siloing our information to Discord being a comparison to old internet. We had indexable information in forums that is "lost", not in the literal sense, but because you wouldn't be able to find it without obsessive digging to find it again. Conversations in Discord communities are very surface level and cyclical because it's far less straight forward to keep track of and link to answers from last week let alone two years ago. It is profoundly sad, to be honest.
Fuzzwah 2 hours ago [-]
Under construction gifs
PartiallyTyped 5 hours ago [-]
That’s the internet before commercialisation and silos.
4 hours ago [-]
username223 3 hours ago [-]
AKA "back when Marc Andreessen had hair and not enough money to build an apocalypse bunker on a personal island."
Towaway69 3 hours ago [-]
And when no one knew you were a dog and neither did they care.
Animated gifs of cat, banner bars and pixels cost one dollar, until a one million were sold.
And it all ran on Chuck Norris' personal computer.
daxfohl 10 hours ago [-]
Heroku? I know it's still around, though IDK who uses it, but I miss those days when it was thriving. One language, one deployment platform, one database, a couple plugins to choose from, everything simple and straightforward, no decision fatigue.
I often wonder, if AI had come 15 years earlier, would it have been a ton better because there weren't a billion different ways to do things? Would we have ever bothered to come up with all the different tech, if AI was just chugging through features efficiently, with consistent training data etc.?
samrolken 8 hours ago [-]
As soon as they put a persistent Salesforce brand banner across the top which did nothing but waste space and put that ugly logo in our face every day, my team started our transition off Heroku pretty much right away.
esperent 7 hours ago [-]
> One language, one deployment platform, one database, a couple plugins to choose from, everything simple and straightforward, no decision fatigue.
Sounds not that different from containers, if you just choose the most popular tooling.
Small projects: docker compose, posgres, redis, nginx
Big projects: kubernetes, posgres, redis, nginx
This is why Heroku lost popularity.
edanm 6 hours ago [-]
Yes. And fittingly, Docker was born out of a Heroku competitor.
robertakarobin 8 hours ago [-]
My company still uses Heroku in production actually. Every time I see the Salesforce logo show up I wince, but we haven't had any issues at all. It continues to make deployment very easy.
SeanAnderson 3 hours ago [-]
Didn't they offer free compute? IIRC all free compute on the Internet went away with the advent of cryptocurrencies as it became practical to abuse the compute and translate it directly into money.
znpy 2 hours ago [-]
I think their main failure points were the following:
- not lowering prices as time went off. They probably kept a super-huger margin profit, but they’re largely irrelevant today
- not building their own datacenters and staying in aws. That would have allowed them to lower prices and gain even more market share. Everyone that has been in amazon/aws likely has seen the internal market rate for ec2 instances and know there’s a HUGE profit margin deriving by building datacenters. Add the recent incredible improvements to compute density (you can easily get 256c/512t and literally terabytes of memory in a 2u box) and you get basically an infinite money glitch.
kesor 2 hours ago [-]
Geocities ; It was a "put your html here" Free web hosting back when people barely knew what html was. Today you have to be a rocket scientist to find a way to host a free static "simple" page online.
ZWoz 14 minutes ago [-]
There are few similar projects. neocities.org for example.
FergusArgyll 5 minutes ago [-]
Github pages
donatj 26 minutes ago [-]
GitHub pages is frankly the closest in my opinion, as someone who used Geocities to host a domain for years longer than I probably should have.
gmac 1 hours ago [-]
… or just use Cloudflare Pages and upload a folder or zip of your static site via a web UI?
mock-possum 2 hours ago [-]
I’ll bet you I could ask any LLM about it and have something launched within an hour.
tumblr will practically let you do that for chrissake
pflenker 22 minutes ago [-]
10/GUI did some deep thinking about the limitations and potential of the (then-fairly new) multi touch input method.
I wished something more had come out of it, instead it stayed a niche concept art video that is mostly forgotten now.
I’m not arguing the solutions it outlined are good, but I think some more discussion around how we interact with touch screens would be needed. Instead, we are still typing on a layout that was invented for mechanical typewriters - in 2025, on our touch screens.
Looking at firefox memory usage, i’m afraid the issue there is not memory safety but rather the average javascript developer being completely and blissfully unaware of and careless about memory memory usage of the software they write
rishabhd 8 minutes ago [-]
Metasploit Incident Response Vehicle (MIRV). Was super pumped when it was announced, it later died in obscurity.
addaon 3 hours ago [-]
The Lockheed D-21 drone. Supersonic ramjet without the complexity of scramjet or the cost of turbojet, hamstrung by the need for a manned launch platform (making operations safety-critical… with predictable results) and recovery to get data off it. Twenty or forty years later it would have been paired by a small number of high-cost launcher UAVs and had its cost driven down to disposable, with data recovery over radio comms… but twenty to forty years later there’s nothing like it, and the maturation of satellites means there almost certainly never will be.
piskov 7 hours ago [-]
Microsoft Silverlight.
Full C# instead of god forbidden js.
Full vector dpi aware UI, with grid, complex animation, and all other stuff that html5/css didn’t have in 2018 but silverlight had even in 2010 (probable even earlier).
MVVM pattern, two-way bindings. Expression Blend (basically figma) that allowed designers create UI that was XAML, had sample data, and could be used be devs as is with maybe some cleanup.
Excellent tooling, static analysis, debugging, what have you.
Rendered and worked completely the same in any browser (safari, ie, chrome, opera, firefox) on mac and windows
If that thing still worked, boy would we be in a better place regarding web apps.
Unfortunately, iPhone killed adobe flash and Silverlight as an aftermath. Too slow processor, too much energy consumption.
drnick1 6 hours ago [-]
I am happy this one died. It was just another attempt by Microsoft to sidestep open web standards in favor of a proprietary platform. The other notorious example is Flash, and both should be considered malware.
Rohansi 6 hours ago [-]
Open web standards are great but consider where we could have been if competition drove them a different way? We're still stuck with JavaScript today (wasm still needs it). Layout/styling is caught up now but where would we be if that came sooner?
motorest 5 hours ago [-]
> Open web standards are great but consider where we could have been if competition drove them a different way? We're still stuck with JavaScript today (wasm still needs it). Layout/styling is caught up now but where would we be if that came sooner?
Why do you think JavaScript is a problem? And a big enough problem to risk destroying open web standards.
piskov 2 hours ago [-]
The same reason Typescript exists
motorest 39 minutes ago [-]
> The same reason Typescript exists
TypeScript exists for the same reason things like mypy exists, and no one in their right mind claims that python's openness should be threatened just because static typing is convenient.
3 hours ago [-]
piskov 1 hours ago [-]
What web standards? :-)
Stuff like angularjs was basically created for the same reason flash/silverlight went down — iphone
ugh123 6 hours ago [-]
Did Silverlight have the same security issues as Flash?
cube00 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, even using C# couldn't save them.
> A remote code execution vulnerability exists when Microsoft Silverlight decodes strings using a malicious decoder that can return negative offsets that cause Silverlight to replace unsafe object headers with contents provided by an attacker. In a web-browsing scenario, an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could obtain the same permissions as the currently logged-on user. If a user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker could take complete control of the affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.
Probably didn’t have the level of adoption needed for the nefarious types to justify spending time finding Silverlight exploits.
hshdhdhehd 4 hours ago [-]
Both a Silverlight and Adobe Flex fan here!
umanwizard 5 hours ago [-]
I loved silverlight. Before I got a “serious” job, I was a summer intern at a small civil engineering consultancy that had gradually moved into developing custom software that it sold mostly to local town/city/county governments in Arizona (mostly custom mapping applications; for example, imagine Google Maps but you can see an overlay of all the street signs your city owns and click on one to insert a note into some database that a worker needs to go repair it… stuff like that).
Lots of their stuff was delivered as Silverlight apps. It turns out that getting office workers to install a blessed plugin from Microsoft and navigate to a web page is much easier than distributing binaries that you have to install and keep up to date. And developing for it was pure pleasure; you got to use C# and Visual Studio, and a GUI interface builder, rather than the Byzantine HTML/JS/CSS ecosystem.
I get why it never took off, but in this niche of small-time custom software it was really way nicer than anything else that existed at the time. Web distribution combined with classic desktop GUI development.
snovymgodym 12 hours ago [-]
ReactOS, the effort to create a free and open source Windows NT reimplementation.
It has been in existence in some form or another for nearly 30 years, but did not gain the traction it needed and as of writing it's still not in a usable state on real hardware. It's not abandoned, but progress on it is moving so slow that I doubt we'll ever see it be released in a state that's useful for real users.
It's too bad, because a drop in Windows replacement would be nice for all the people losing Windows 10 support right now.
On the other hand, I think people underestimate the difficulty involved in the project and compare it unfavorably to Linux, BSD, etc.
Unix and its source code was pretty well publicly documented and understood for decades before those projects started, nothing like that ever really existed for Windows.
ghssds 11 hours ago [-]
They had no chance. Look how long it tooks for Wine to get where they are. Their project is Wine + a kernel + device drivers compatibility, and a moving target.
dlcarrier 3 hours ago [-]
The easiest way to avoid patent liabilities is to always be 20 years behind.
bitwize 4 hours ago [-]
> ReactOS, the effort to create a free and open source Windows NT reimplementation.
Some projects creep along slowly until something triggers an interest and suddenly they leap ahead.
MAME's Tandy 2000 implementation was unusable, until someone found a copy of Windows 1.0 for the Tandy 2000, then the emulation caught up until Windows ran.
Maybe ReactOS will get a big influx of activity after Windows 10 support goes offline in a couple days, or even shortly after when you can't turn AI spying off, not even three times a year.
znpy 2 hours ago [-]
Not so long ago there was a leak of windows’ source code, up to xp and 2003 server… the leak was so complete there are videos on YouTube about people building and booting (!!!) windows from there.
And yet, no big leap in ReactOS (at least for now).
ranma42 1 hours ago [-]
IIRC ReactOs forbids you from contributing if you had access to the windows source code in some way shape or form.
Analemma_ 12 hours ago [-]
Wine, Proton and virtualization all got good enough that there's no need for a half-baked binary-compatible Windows reimplementation, and I think that took a lot of the oxygen out of what could have been energy towards ReactOS. It's a cool concept but not really a thing anybody requires.
It was a series of experiments with new approaches to programming. Kind of reminded me of the research that gave us Smalltalk. It would have been interesting to see where they went with it, but they wound down the project.
Why did they not pursue this? Were there any applications using this in the wild? It was not immediately obvious from their github repository.
gmuslera 12 hours ago [-]
Maemo/Meego. I know there is Sailfish still around, but things would had been very different today if Nokia had put all its weight on it back then.
ajot 11 hours ago [-]
They should have partnered not only with Intel, but with Palm, RIM or whatever other then-giant to rival Android. Those two went their own ways with WebOS and buying QNX, so maybe they could have agreed to form a consortium for an open and interoperable mobile OS
JoshTriplett 7 hours ago [-]
I loved my N900, and my N800 before that, and I would have loved to have seen successors. Ultimately, I ended up switching to Android because I was tired of things only available as apps. Since then, web technologies have gotten better, and it's become much more feasible to use almost exclusively websites.
bitwize 4 hours ago [-]
> it's become much more feasible to use almost exclusively websites.
And that's precisely why companies nerf their web sites and put a little popup that says "<service> works better on the app".
heavyset_go 4 hours ago [-]
In my ideal world, Maemo/Meego and Palm's WebOS (not LG's bastardization of it) would be today's Android and iOS.
Apple would have inevitably done their own thing, but it would have been really nice to have two widely used, mature and open mobile Linux platforms.
alance 2 hours ago [-]
Worth remembering it was the Microsoft partnership with Nokia that intentionally killed it.
ValdikSS 2 hours ago [-]
ZeroNet decentralized web platform:
- Based on BitTorrent ideas
- Completely decentralized websites' code and data
- Either completely decentralized or controllable-decentralized authentication
- Could be integrated into existing websites (!)
It's not kind of dead, there's a supported fork, but it still feels like a revolution that did not happen. It works really well.
rzzzt 2 hours ago [-]
Same with Beaker Browser and Dat/Hyperdrive as its backend.
bdcravens 4 hours ago [-]
RethinkDB. Technically it still exists (under The Linux Foundation), but (IMO) the original company's widening scope (the Horizon BaaS) that eventually led to its demise killed its momentum.
alex7o 4 hours ago [-]
Man I loves the original concept for demos but never build anything real with it. Curious if anyone did?
In 2011, before TypeScript, Next.js or even React, they had seamless server-client code, in a strongly typed functional language with support for features like JSX-like inline HTML, async/await, string interpolation, built-in MongoDB ORM, CSS-in-JS, and many syntax features that were added to ECMAScript since then.
I find it wild how this project was 90%+ correct on how we will build web apps 14 years later.
ofalkaed 11 hours ago [-]
Non Daw. Its breaking up each function of the DAW into its own application gave a better experience in each of those functions, especially when you only needed that aspect, you were not working around everything else that the DAW offers. The integration between the various parts was not all that it could be but I think the idea has some real potential.
I've never heard of this software before. Any idea why it's discontinued? There are a bunch of weird messages that point to sort of a hostile take over of the project by forking, but it doesn't say anything about why or how it was discontinued.
marttt 5 hours ago [-]
Thought about Non immediately, but I figured it must have (had) about 2 other users amongst HNers, though. :) Nice to see it mentioned.
I used it quite a bit to produce radio shows for my country's public broadcasting. Because Non's line-oriented session format was so easy to parse with classic Unix tools, I wrote a bunch of scripts for it with Awk etc. (E.g. calculating the total length of clips highlighted with brown color in the DAW -- which was stuff meant for editing out; or creating a poor man's "ripple editing" feature by moving loosely-placed clips precisely side by side; or, eventually, converting the sessions to Samplitude EDL format, and, from there, to Pro Tools via AATranslator [1] (because our studio was using PT), etc. Really fun times!)
Microsoft Songsmith is another one that deserved a second life. It let you hum or sing a melody and would auto-generate full backing tracks, guitar, bass, drums, chords, in any style you chose.
It looked a bit goofy in the promo videos, but under the hood it was doing real-time chord detection and accompaniment generation. Basically a prototype of what AI music tools like Suno, Udio, or Mubert are doing today, fifteen years too early.
If Microsoft had kept iterating on it with modern ML models, it could’ve become the "GarageBand for ideas that start as a hum."
Was recently reading about Project Ara, the modular smartphone project by Google/Motorola [1]. Would have liked to see a few more iterations of the idea. Something more customizable than what we have today without having to take the phone apart.
It would have been very thick, too thick to compete.
hshdhdhehd 4 hours ago [-]
Elm programming language. Arguably not dead but somewhat incomplete and not actively worked on.
donatj 17 minutes ago [-]
It's been a number of years but my understanding was they kind of killed all the momentum it had by removing support for custom operators which broke everyone's code?
It's at a very early stage of development but looks promising
zem 3 hours ago [-]
opa, along the same lines - really nice ML based language for isomorphic full stack web development.
PufPufPuf 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, Opa was wildly ahead of its time, I actually just wrote a top level comment about it. Basically Next.js+TypeScript+modern ECMAScript features, but in 2011.
spooky_deep 3 hours ago [-]
A few commits recently.
There are lots of competing MLs you can use instead:
- F# (Fable)
- ReasonML
- OCaml (Bucklescript)
- Haskell
- PureScript
IMO the problem with Elm was actually The Elm Architecture.
sauercrowd 3 hours ago [-]
What's "the Elm architecture"?
fodkodrasz 2 hours ago [-]
A simple UI programming pattern, with a circular, unidirectional data flow. It is very rigid by design, to be side-effect free, functional, unidirectional:
I'm no frontend guy, but I think it did/was inspire(d) react (redux?) maybe. Corrections on this very welcome
Lerc 11 hours ago [-]
Boot2Gecko or whatever the browser as Operating system was called. This was a project that should have focused on providing whatever its current users needed expanding and evolving to do whatever those users wanted it to do better.
Instead it went chasing markets, abandoning existing users as it did so, in favour of potential larger pools of users elsewhere. In the end it failed to find a niche going forward while leaving a trail of abandoned niches behind it.
hamdingers 6 hours ago [-]
I adored my Firefox Phones. Writing apps was so easy I built myself dozens of little one-offs. Imagine if it had survived to today, its trivial html/css/js apps could be vibe coded on-device and be the ultimate personalized phone.
Luckily it wasn't long after Mozilla abandoned it that PWAs were introduced and I could port the apps I cared about.
znpy 2 hours ago [-]
> Imagine if it had survived to today, its trivial html/css/js apps could be vibe coded on-device and be the ultimate personalized phone.
That’s actually an incredibly cool concept.
toast0 6 hours ago [-]
It lives on as KaiOS. Has limited success as a low end phone platform now.
GeneralMaximus 3 hours ago [-]
For a few short months circa 2016 or 2017, KaiOS was the number one mobile OS in India. This was probably because of all the ultra-cheap KaiOS-powered Reliance Jio phones flooding the Indian market at the time.
I noticed the trend when I was working on a major web property for the Aditya Birla conglomerate. My whole team was pleasantly surprised, and we made sure to test everything in Firefox for that project. But everyone switched to Android + Chrome over the next few years, which was a shame.
Today, India is 90% Chrome :(
cr125rider 11 hours ago [-]
Macromedia Flash. Its scope and security profile was too big. It gave way to HTML’s canvas. But man, the tooling is still no where near as good. Movieclips, my beloved. I loved it all.
netsharc 11 hours ago [-]
The iPhone killed Flash, probably because it would've been a way to create apps for it, more probably because it would've been laggy in the 2007 hardware, and people would've considered the iPhone "a piece of junk".
Interesting how Flash became the almost universal way to play videos in the browser, in the latter half of the 2000's (damn I'm old...).
bapak 5 hours ago [-]
It's incredible to me that they killed the whole tool instead of making a JS/Canvas port. Even without "full flash websites", there's still need for vectorial animations on the web.
bdcravens 4 hours ago [-]
There was the discontinued Adobe Edge suite, which was what you described.
Adobe Animate (new name for Macromedia/Adobe Flash) can output to JS/Canvas now.
JoeyJoJoJr 2 hours ago [-]
Can it really do interactive things though, like games? The main draw card of Flash was its excellent integration of code and animation.
iambateman 8 hours ago [-]
I agree that the tooling was unbelievable…better for interactive web than anything that exists today AFAIK.
I wonder why one one has managed to build something comparable that does work on a phone.
socalgal2 7 hours ago [-]
I agree the tooling was great, .... for making apps/games for desktops with a mouse and keyboard and a landscape screen of at least a certain size.
Maybe they could have fixed all that for touch screens, small portrait screens, and more but they never did make it responsive AFAIK.
dpcan 11 hours ago [-]
Adobe Animate is still just Flash from a tool-standoint.
Are you referring to the SWF file format?
billrobertson42 11 hours ago [-]
I took it as sarcasm.
Froedlich 9 hours ago [-]
As a Linux user, I hated Flash with a passion. It mostly didn't work despite several Linux implementations. About the time they sorted all the bugs out, it went away. Good riddance.
glitchc 7 hours ago [-]
I for one am so glad Flash died. At one point I dreaded navigating to a new website because of it.
tmtvl 4 hours ago [-]
CLPM, the Common Lisp Package Manager. The Quicklisp client doesn't do HTTPS, ql-https doesn't do Ultralisp, and OCICL (which I'm currently using) doesn't do system-wide packages. CLPM is a great project, but it's gone neglected long enough that it's bitrotted and needs some thorough patching to be made usable. Fortunately Common Lisp is still as stable as it has been for 31 years, so it's just the code which interacts with 3rd-party libraries that needs updating.
kesor 2 hours ago [-]
Skype ; Because my R.I.P. grandma was using it to talk to her relatives overseas just like she would use a phone, but it didn't cost an arm and a leg (unlike phone calls).
silcoon 18 minutes ago [-]
One of the best P2P software at the time. It was so simple and effective and allowed people to call real phones with Skype credit.
A genius product ripped my Microsoft. Have you used Microsoft Teams recently? Bad UI, hard to configure external hardware and good level of incompatibility, missing the good old "Echo / Sound Test Service". At a point I even installed Skype of my old Android but was sucking up too much battery.
evbogue 11 hours ago [-]
Secure-Scuttlebot (the gossiped social network) died circa 2019 or 2024 depending who we ask. It died before it's time for various reasons including:
1. competing visions for how the entire system should work
2. dependence on early/experimental npm libraries
3. devs breaking existing features due to "innovation"
4. a lot of interpersonal drama because it was not just open source but also a social network
the ideas are really good, someone should make the project again and run with it
myself248 3 minutes ago [-]
I tried it twice and the onboarding experience was insurmountable. Never managed to achieve a critical mass of followers or whatever they call it, so things were permanently read-only for me. I'd reply but nobody saw it.
It was a fascinating protocol underneath, but the social follow structure seemed to select strongly for folks who already had a following or something.
v3ss0n 6 hours ago [-]
So much drama there too, but it's designed to attract drmas
znpy 2 hours ago [-]
Drama has killed the technological progress in open source, if you ask me.
Having seen what goes on in the foss world and what goes on in the large faang-size corporate world, no wonder the corporate world is light-years ahead.
exp1orer 11 hours ago [-]
It might be too soon to call it abandoned, but I was very intrigued by the Austral [1] language. The spec [2] is worth reading, it has an unusual clarity of thought and originality, and I was hoping that it would find some traction. Unfortunately it seems that the author is no longer actively working on it.
I played with Austral about a year ago and really wanted to use it for my projects, but as a hobbyist and mostly inept programmer it lacked the community and ecosystem I require. I found it almost intuitive and the spec does an amazing job of explaining the language. Would love to see it get a foothold.
ouch, last “recent update” in 2023. Any idea what happened?
valorzard 7 hours ago [-]
The author got hired by Modular, the AI startup founded by the creators of LLVM and Swift, and is now working on the new language Mojo.
He’s been bringing a bunch of ideas from Vale to Mojo
alexeldeib 6 hours ago [-]
Oh nice! I just had an excuse to try mojo via max inference, it was pretty impressive. Basically on par with vllm for some small benchmarks, bit of variance in ttft and tpot. Very cool!
G_o_D 26 minutes ago [-]
JavaScript Style Sheets (JSS)
Introduced by netscape navigator 4, never came into mainstream as people were reluctant to give up CSS
kesor 2 hours ago [-]
ICQ ; It was the first instant messenger, the technology could have adopted voice (and not get disrupted by Skype) and mobile (and not get disrupted by whatsapp) and group chat (and not get disrupted by slack/discord). But they didn't even try and put up a fight.
rkomorn 2 hours ago [-]
They got bought by AOL in 98, long before most/all of this innovation happened?
Edit: in fact I'd say they were irrelevant before pretty much all of those innovations. By the time AIM or MSN Messenger really became popular, ICQ didn't matter anymore.
patapong 6 hours ago [-]
Visual Basic 6 - arguably the most accessible way of creating GUI apps.
homarp 4 hours ago [-]
you still have Lazarus, "a Delphi compatible cross-platform IDE for Rapid Application Development."
stavros 2 hours ago [-]
Lazarus seems like a fantastic GUI builder, but the problem with it (and VB6) is that I have to use a language with 0.01% the ecosystem of Python.
People talk so much about how you need to write code that fits well within the rest of the codebase, but what tools do we have to explore codebases and see what is connected to what? Clicking through files feels kind of stupid because if you have to work with changes that involve 40 files, good luck keeping any of that in your working memory. In my experience, the JetBrains dependency graphs also aren't good enough.
Sourcetrail was a code visualization tool that allowed you to visualize those dependencies and click around the codebase that way, see what methods are connected to what and so on, thanks to a lovely UI. I don't think it was enough alone, but I absolutely think we need something like this: https://www.dbvis.com/features/database-management/#explore-... but for your code, especially for codebases with hundreds of thousands or like above a million SLoC.
I yearn to some day view entire codebases as graphs with similarly approachable visualization, where all the dependencies are highlighted when I click an element. This could also go so, so much further - you could have a debugger breakpoint set and see the variables at each place, alongside being able to visually see how code is called throughout the codebase, or hell, maybe even visualize every possible route that could be taken.
hyperific 4 hours ago [-]
RAM Disks. Basically extremely fast storage using RAM sticks slotted into a specially made board that fit in a PCIe slot. Not sure what happened to the project exactly but the website disappeared sometime in 2023.
The idea that you could read and write data at RAM speeds was really exciting to me. At work it's very common to see microscope image sets anywhere from 20 to 200 GB and file transfer rates can be a big bottleneck.
Products to attach RAM to expansion slots have long existed and continue to be developed. It's a matter of adding more memory once all of the DIMMs are full.
What to do with it, once it's there, is a concern of software, but specialized hardware is needed to get it there.
rzzzt 2 hours ago [-]
Also battery backup (or at least some beefy capacitors).
carstenhag 4 hours ago [-]
You can do this in software, I tried it a few times with games and just other stuff ~10 years ago. Why would it have to be a hardware solution?
robotswantdata 4 hours ago [-]
soon will be able to buy a gigabyte AI Top CXL R5X4. PCI expansion card with up to 512gb RAM over four DIMMs.
Connect your phone to a display, mouse, keyboard and get a full desktop experience.
At the time smartphones were not powerful enough, cables were fiddly (adapters, HDMI, USB A instead of a single USB c cable) and virtualization and containers not quite there.
Today, going via pkvm seems like promising approach. Seamless sharing of data, apps etc. will take some work, though.
kesor 2 hours ago [-]
CueCat it was an affordable barcode scanner that anyone could have connected to their computer, and it scanned barcodes. It took almost two decades before we could finally do it again with our mobile phones.
zyklonix 5 hours ago [-]
I always thought Microsoft Popfly had huge potential and was way ahead of its time. It made building web mashups feel like playing with Lego blocks, drag, drop, connect APIs, and instantly see the result.
If something like that existed today, powered by modern APIs and AI, it could become the ultimate no-code creativity playground.
heavyset_go 4 hours ago [-]
Windows Longhorn. It looked cool and had some promising features that never made it into Vista, like WinFS.
dpcan 11 hours ago [-]
Adobe Fireworks - easiest vector / photo editor crossover app there ever was.
donatj 12 minutes ago [-]
At my last job m our designer was a Fireworks holdout. It was very pleasant. As someone who has to implement UIs, I greatly preferred it to Figma, though with today's flat boring designs there's a lot less slicing.
MontyCarloHall 11 hours ago [-]
It's a real shame its raster functionality wasn't integrated into Illustrator. Adobe really butchered the whole Macromedia portfolio, didn't they?
(For those unfamiliar, Illustrator is a pure vector graphics editor; once you rasterize its shapes, they become uneditable fixed bitmaps. Fireworks was a vector graphics editor that rendered at a constant DPI, so it basically let you edit raster bitmaps like they were vectors. It was invaluable for pixel-perfect graphic design. Nothing since lets you do that, though with high-DPI screens and resolution-independent UIs being the norm these days, this functionality is less relevant than it used to be.)
vyrotek 11 hours ago [-]
Did not expect to see FW mentioned here. Absolutely loved it.
Just barely stopped using my CS6 copy. Still haven't found anything as intuitive.
bapak 5 hours ago [-]
Gah. Fireworks and Dreamweaver were my "web designer" jumpstart. Ps and Ai had nothing on Fireworks
chanux 4 hours ago [-]
Everpix: Looked like good execution but they were probably ahead of time.
Mozilla heka. As far as data collection and processing goes, we are still stuck with Logstash after all of these years. Heka promised a much more efficient solution, being implemented with Go and Lua plugins.
Jordan-117 6 hours ago [-]
Developer Ryan Flaherty's "Via" project, a novel approach to streaming large games in real time.
>This presentation introduces Via, a virtual file system designed to address the challenges of large game downloads and storage. Unlike cloud gaming, which suffers from poor image quality, input latency, and high hosting costs, Via allows games to run locally while only downloading game data on demand. The setup process is demonstrated with Halo Infinite, showing a simple installation that involves signing into Steam and allocating storage space for Via's cache.
>Via creates a virtual Steam library, presenting all owned games as installed, even though their data is not fully downloaded. When a game is launched, Via's virtual file system intercepts requests and downloads only the necessary game content as it's needed. This on-demand downloading is integrated with the game's existing streaming capabilities, leveraging features like level-of-detail and asset streaming. Performance metrics are displayed, showing download rates, server ping, and disk commit rates, illustrating how Via fetches data in real-time.
>The system prioritizes caching frequently accessed data. After an initial download, subsequent play sessions benefit from the on-disk cache, significantly reducing or eliminating the need for network downloads. This means the actual size of a game becomes less relevant, as only a portion of it needs to be stored locally. While server locations are currently limited, the goal is to establish a global network to ensure low ping. The presentation concludes by highlighting Via's frictionless user experience, aiming for a setup so seamless that users are unaware of its presence. Via is currently in early access and free to use, with hopes of future distribution partnerships.
I'm amazed the video still has under 4,000 views. Sadly, Flaherty got hired by XAI and gave up promoting the project.
But I could see the technology behind it working wonders for Steam, Game Pass, etc.
Rohansi 5 hours ago [-]
Wait until you hear that almost all Unity games don't really have asset streaming because the engine loads things eagerly by default.
I don't see how this could take off. Internet speeds are getting quicker, disk space is getting cheaper, and this will slow down load times. And what's worse is the more you need this tech the worse experience you have.
LVB 5 hours ago [-]
HP TouchPad
Just on principle, I'd have liked to see it on the market for more than 49 days! It pains me as an engineer to think of the effort to bring a hardware device to market for such a minuscule run.
silisili 3 hours ago [-]
I've argued this for years on this site...but AOL.
At its best, having IM, email, browser, games, keywords, chats, etc. was a beautiful idea IMO. That they were an ISP seemed secondary or even unrelated to the idea. But they chose to charge for access even in the age of broadband, and adopt gym level subscription tactics to boot, and people decided they'd rather not pay it which is to be expected. I often wonder if they'd have survived as a software company otherwise.
They were basically a better thought out Facebook before Facebook, in my opinion.
spike021 2 hours ago [-]
I miss AIM, and that type of messenger in general, a lot.
You could purposely choose to be online or offline.
Much easier to draw a line back then about how often you were online.
Borg3 2 hours ago [-]
XenClient. I would really love to have some minimal OS HyperVisor running, and then you slap multiple OSes on top of that w/ easy full GUI switching via some hotkeys like Ctrl+Shift+F1. Additionaly, special drivers to virtualize Gfx and Sfx devices so every VM have full desktop capabilities and low latency.
Unfortunately, it died because its very niche and also they couldnt keep up with development of drivers for desktops.. This is even worse today...
zem 3 hours ago [-]
VPRI, I was really hoping it would profoundly revolutionise desktop application development and maybe even lead to a new desktop model, and instead they wound up the project without having achieved the kind of impact I was dreaming of.
manmal 1 hours ago [-]
WebOS, the palm smartphone OS. It was beautiful at the time and predicted many of the swipe gestures iOS and Android adopted much later.
youngtaff 9 minutes ago [-]
Now in LG TVs
ssss11 2 hours ago [-]
Flickr - that was the future of photo storage, sharing, discovery.
What was the bookmarks social tool called from 00’s? I loved it and it fell off the earth. You could save your bookmarks, “publish” them to the community, share etc..
What ever happened to those build your own homepage apps like startpage (I think)? I always thought those would take off
lentil_soup 1 hours ago [-]
>> What was the bookmarks social tool called from 00’s?
del.icio.us! Funnily, also killed by yahoo like flickr
countrymile 11 hours ago [-]
The IBM school's computer. Developed by IBM Hursley in 1967, it was years ahead in its design, display out to a television and storage on normal audio tape. Would have kick started an educational revolution if it had been launched beyond the 10 prototype machines.
Pivotal Tracker ; Users loved it, it had an excellent model for tracking work and limiting work in progress on software projects. There is no real good alternative and the usual suspects for tracking project work are horrible in comparison.
I feel like Zen (Firefox based) captures a few good things from Ubiquity. It could do more though. Zen + Kagi gets even more with the bang commands.
commandersaki 7 hours ago [-]
Anyone remember Openmoko, the first commercialised open source smart phone. Was heaps buggy though, not really polished, etc. It’s only redeeming feature was the open source software and hardware (specs?).
LargoLasskhyfv 57 minutes ago [-]
There was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone and it's successor PinePhonePro. Bugginess and general impracticalities brought up to more recent standards. Inflation-adjusted, of course!
megous 38 minutes ago [-]
Pinephone still is, and is set to be produced for next 3 years, as promissed in 2018.
38 minutes ago [-]
hardwarepirate 2 hours ago [-]
https://www.kite.com for python
i first learned about it when i was working in an university group and had the task to transform a windowing algorithm already working on matlab to python.
it felt like a modern linter and lsp with additional support through machine learning. i don't quite know why it got comparative small recognition, but perhaps enough to remain an avantgarde pioneering both python and machine learning support for further generations and wider applications.
i first learned about it when i was working in an university group and had the task to transform a windowing algorithm already working on matlab to python.
it felt like a modern linter and lsp with additional support through machine learning. i don't quite know why it got comparative small recognition, but perhaps enough to remain an avantgarde pioneering both python and machine learning support for further generations and wider applications.
abeyer 2 hours ago [-]
Perhaps because their repeated bad behavior as a company outweighed anything good they put out.
kesor 2 hours ago [-]
Google Wave ; It had a bunch of agents participating in editing the text together with you, making spelling fixes, finding additional information to enrich your content, and so much more.
emigre 2 hours ago [-]
The Atom code editor. It was good to have a mainstream alternative to VS Code, it's a pity it reached end-of-life.
holysantamaria 11 hours ago [-]
Opa language 2012, it was a typed nextjs before its time.
I think the market was still skeptical about nodejs on the server at the time but other than that I don’t really know why it didn’t take off
themerone 6 hours ago [-]
Launching under AGPL was the kiss of death. They eventually went MIT, but the developers it steered away, probably never gave it a second chance
daxfohl 11 hours ago [-]
I came to say Opa too. I liked the language but the meteor-like framework it was bundled with, while nice for prototyping, was a pain to work around when it didn't do what you needed.
That said, frameworks were all the buzz back in the day, so the language alone probably wouldn't have gone anywhere without it.
kristianc 11 hours ago [-]
Nokia Maps. There was a brief period in the early 2010s where Nokia had the best mapping product on the planet, and it was given away for free on Lumia phones at a time when TomTom and Garmin were still charging $60+ for navigation apps.
walterbell 11 hours ago [-]
Still around as "Here Maps"
ahartmetz 11 hours ago [-]
Started to suck pretty badly not long after getting acquired by German car companies. It used to be good.
rhodey 11 hours ago [-]
choojs
All of the upside and none of the downside of react
No JSX and no compiler, all native js
The main dev is paid by microsoft to do oss rust nowadays
I use choo for my personal projects and have used it twice professionally
Choo suffered from not having an ecosystem, same with mithtil and other "like react but not" also-rans.
croisillon 1 hours ago [-]
Zenbe, a cute and practical webmail interface. Bought and killed by Facebook way too soon!
b33f 2 hours ago [-]
TrueCrypt. free multi-platform open source disk encryption that suddenly disappeared in mysterious circumstances
mock-possum 2 hours ago [-]
VeraCrypt is very nearly a drop in replacement.
KnuthIsGod 3 hours ago [-]
Gentoo file manager.
(Not the Linux distribution with the same name)
I have used it for years.
A two pane manager, it makes defining file associations, applications invoked by extensions and short cut buttons easy convenient.
Sadly it is abandonware now.
Slowly migrating to Double Commander now...
mbirth 9 hours ago [-]
wua.la … the original version. You share part of your storage to get the same amount back as resilient cloud storage from others. Was bought and killed by LaCie (now Seagate). They later provided paid-for cloud storage under the same name but it didn’t take off.
In the late 90s there was a website called fuckedcompany which was a place where people could spill the beans about startups (mainly in silicon valley). It was anonymous and a pretty good view into the real state of tech. Now there is twitter/x but it's not as focused on this niche.
The closest sites I've found are Web3 is Going Just Great and Pivot to AI, which are newsfeeds of various car crashes in their respective hype arenas, although without any insider scoops/gossip.
cmrdporcupine 5 hours ago [-]
fuckedcompany was awesome but very much a product of the early stages of the .com bubble poppage
I kind of expect we might see something similar if the AI bubble pops
I wonder who owns the domain now
albertoCaroM 30 minutes ago [-]
I loved onivim2
can16358p 1 hours ago [-]
All those modular smartphones, and also Amazon's Fire phone.
Why? Obviously close-to-zero market. It was unbelievable how those people though those projects would even succeed.
walterbell 11 hours ago [-]
SMIL. Nothing comparable for seamless media stream composition, 20 years later.
kumavis 5 hours ago [-]
Keybase <3
bitwize 3 hours ago [-]
The Amiga. Just... the Amiga.
archargelod 1 hours ago [-]
RIP the concept of owning your computer and user-written programs
mwpmaybe 11 hours ago [-]
I thought Google Wave was going to kill email and chat and a whole bunch of other stuff.
stavros 2 hours ago [-]
Worse is better.
iancmceachern 4 hours ago [-]
Yahoo Pipes
protocolture 4 hours ago [-]
Microsoft Courier.
Dual screen iPad killer, productivity optimised. IIRC Microsoft OneNote is its only legacy.
Killed because both the Windows team and the Office team thought it was stepping on their toes.
nurettin 4 hours ago [-]
Nokia smartphone line killed by Microshaft.
jcastro 11 hours ago [-]
OS/2 my beloved.
nickthegreek 11 hours ago [-]
I was super excited for BeOS myself.
walterbell 10 hours ago [-]
BeOS-lineage Binder IPC continues in Android.
Froedlich 8 hours ago [-]
I'm booting and running Haiku on my Thinkpad. It's a from-scratch workalike of BeOS, and able to run Be software. Though, frankly, Be software is totally 1990s, so a lot of Linux software written for Qt has been ported to Haiku.
In the end I wound up with basically the same application software as on my Debian desktop, except running on Haiku instead of Linux. Haiku is noticeably snappier and more responsive than Linux+X+Qt+KDE, though.
BirAdam 8 hours ago [-]
Did an install of OS/2 3.0 recently, and it was just as wonderful as the first time I used it. That team got so much so right.
walterbell 10 hours ago [-]
OS/2 ISV Stardock gave us Win8 start button.
burnt-resistor 7 hours ago [-]
In late September or early October 1996, Fry's Electronics places a full page promo ad on the back of the business section of the San Jose Mercury News for OS/2 4.0 "WRAP [sic]" in 256 pt font in multiple places. Oops!
hagbard_c 11 hours ago [-]
Nah, that time has passed and there's not much to miss from the base OS. What would be interesting is for IBM to publish the source to the Workplace Shell and the underlying SOM code so it might get a new life running on one of the free *nixes.
walterbell 11 hours ago [-]
It ran lots of banking ATMs that were not hacked.
mikewarot 9 hours ago [-]
Memex, it was a solution to the biggest problem facing the scientific community just after WW2 and it still hasn't been implemented, 80 years later!
Adobe Flex with Adobe Catalyst. Design a GUI in Photoshop, export it to Flex/Flash to add interactivity.
Looked cool during demos. Got killed when Flash died.
ggm 8 hours ago [-]
X.400 we're approaching it by stepwise refinement. It had X.500 which lives on as X.509 certificates and LDAP.
ISO/OSI had session layer. ie much of what QUIC does regarding underlying multiple transports.
Speaking of X.509 the s-expressions certificate format was more interesting in many ways.
thequux 4 hours ago [-]
OSI's session layer did very little more than TCP/UDP port numbers; in the OSI model you would open a connection to a machine, then use that connection to open a session to a particular application.
X.400 was a nice idea, but the ideal of having a single global directory predates security. I can understand why it never happened
On X.509, the spec spends two chapters on attribute certificates, which I've never seen used in the wild. It's a shame; identity certificates do a terrible job at authentication
linguae 5 hours ago [-]
I could think of many examples, but I'll talk about the top four that I have in mind, that I'd like to see re-evaluated for today's times.
1. When Windows Vista was being developed, there were plans to replace the file system with a database, allowing users to organize and search for files using database queries. This was known as WinFS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS). I was looking forward to this in the mid-2000s. Unfortunately Vista was famously delayed, and in an attempt to get Vista released, Microsoft pared back features, and one of these features was WinFS. Instead of WinFS, we ended up getting improved file search capabilities. It's unfortunate that there's been no proposals for database file systems for desktop operating systems since.
2. OpenDoc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc) was an Apple technology from the mid-1990s that promoted component-based software. Instead of large, monolithic applications such as Microsoft Excel and Adobe Photoshop, functionality would be offered in the form of components, and users and developers can combine these components to form larger solutions. For example, as an alternative to Adobe Photoshop, there would be a component for the drawing canvas, and there would be separate components for each editing feature. Components can be bought and sold on an open marketplace. It reminds me of Unix pipes, but for GUIs. There's a nice promotional video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFJdjk2rq4E.
OpenDoc was a radically different paradigm for software development and distribution, and I think this was could have been an interesting contender against the dominance that Microsoft and Adobe enjoys in their markets. OpenDoc actually did ship, and there were some products made using OpenDoc, most notably Apple's Cyberdog browser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog).
Unfortunately, Apple was in dire straits in the mid-1990s. Windows 95 was a formidable challenger to Mac OS, and cheaper x86 PCs were viable alternatives to Macintosh hardware. Apple was an acquisition target; IBM and Apple almost merged, and there was also an attempt to merge Apple with Sun. Additionally, the Macintosh platform depended on the availability of software products like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, the very types of products that OpenDoc directly challenged. When Apple purchased NeXT in December 1996, Steve Jobs returned to Apple, and all work on OpenDoc ended not too long afterward, leading to this now-famous exchange during WWDC 1997 between Steve Jobs and an upset developer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o).
I don't believe that OpenDoc fits in with Apple's business strategy, even today, and while Microsoft offers component-based technologies that are similar to OpenDoc (OLE, COM, DCOM, ActiveX, .NET), the Windows ecosystem is still dominated by monolithic applications.
I think it would have been cool had the FOSS community pursued component-based software. It would have been really cool to apt-get components from remote repositories and link them together, either using GUI tools, command-line tools, or programmatically to build custom solutions. Instead, we ended up with large, monolithic applications like LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, etc.
3. I am particularly intrigued by Symbolics Genera (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system)), an operating system designed for Symbolics Lisp machines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics). In Genera, everything is a Lisp object. The interface is an interesting hybrid of early GUIs and the command line. To me, Genera could have been a very interesting substrate for building component-based software; in fact, it would have been far easier building OpenDoc on top of Common Lisp than on top of C or C++. Sadly, Symbolics' fortunes soured after the AI winter of the late 1980s/early 1990s, and while Genera was ported to other platforms such as the DEC Alpha and later the x86-64 via the creation of a Lisp machine emulator, it's extremely difficult for people to obtain a legal copy, and it was never made open source. The closest things to Genera we have are Xerox Interlisp, a competing operating system that was recently made open source, and open-source descendants of Smalltalk-80: Squeak, Pharo, and Cuis-Smalltalk.
4. Apple's "interregnum" years between 1985 and 1996 were filled with many intriguing projects that were either never commercialized, were cancelled before release, or did not make a splash in the marketplace. One of the most interesting projects during the era was Bauhaus, a Lisp operating system developed for the Newton platform. Mikel Evins, a regular poster here, describes it here (https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-07-12-reimagining-ba...). It would have been really cool to have a mass-market Lisp operating system, especially if it had the same support for ubiquitous dynamic objects like Symbolic Genera.
lapsed_lisper 2 minutes ago [-]
Re: obtaining a legal copy of Genera, as of 2023 Symbolics still existed as a corporate entity and they continued to sell x86-64 laptops with "Portable Genera 2.0". I bought one from them then, and occasionally see them listing some on Ebay. (This isn't intended as an advertisement or endorsement, just a statement. I think it's quite unfortunate that Symbolics's software hasn't been made freely available, since it's now really only of historical interest.)
silcoon 23 minutes ago [-]
I'm intrigued by Symbolics Genera too. It would have been interesting seeing further development of Lisp OS, especially when they would have had internet connection. Rewriting part of your OS and see the changes in real time? Maybe web apps could have been just software written in Lisp, downloaded on the machine and directly being executed in a safe environment on top of the Genera image. Big stuff.
w10-1 5 hours ago [-]
OpenDoc was mostly given to Taligent (the Apple and IBM joint venture) to develop. It was full-on OO: about 35 files for a minimal application, which meant that Erich Gamma had to build a whole new type of IDE which was unusable. He likely learned his lesson: it's pretty hard to define interfaces between unknown components without forcing each one to know about all the others.
MIME types for mail addressed much of the demand for pluggable data types.
klabetron 2 hours ago [-]
Gawker.
j45 5 hours ago [-]
WebOS.
Javascript/HTML based smartphone / app interface.
docandrew 5 hours ago [-]
I had a Palm Pre and really enjoyed this, shame it didn’t make it.
jmclnx 9 hours ago [-]
Fro me, DESQview. Microsoft tried to buy it in order to use its tech in their windows system. I wonder how things would be today if they were able to purchase it. But DESQview said "no".
Instead it went into a slow death spiral due to Windows 95.
chipx86 4 hours ago [-]
Love seeing this one. My uncle was co-founder of Quarterdeck, and I grew up in a world of DESQview and QEMM. It was a big influence on me as a child.
Got a good family story about that whole acquisition attempt, but I don't want to speak publicly on behalf of my uncle. I know we've talked at length about the what-ifs of that moment.
I do have a scattering of some neat Quarterdeck memorabilia I can share, though:
DESQview/X sucked the wind out of DESQview's sails. It was, on paper, a massive upgrade. I had been running DESQview for years, with a dial-up BBS in the background.
But you couldn't actually buy /X. After trying to buy a copy, my publisher even contacted DESQ's marketing people to get a copy for me, and they wouldn't turn one over. Supposedly there were some copies actually sold, but too few, too late, and then /X was dropped. There was at least one more release of plain DESQview after that, but by then Windows was eating its lunch.
catskull 7 hours ago [-]
Google Inbox
BerislavLopac 58 minutes ago [-]
HyperCard
kurtis_reed 10 hours ago [-]
Windows Phone
Froedlich 8 hours ago [-]
Windows Phone's UI is still with us, from Windows 8 onwards. Everything on 8, 10, and 11 is optimized for a touch interface on a small screen, which is ridiculous on a modern desktop with a 32" or so monitor and a trackball or mouse.
Findecanor 2 hours ago [-]
From Windows 10, there is a switch between desktop and touch mode.
They stopped supporting small tablets some years ago though, and made it worse with every Windows update. I can only surmise that it was to make people stop using them. Slow GUI, low contrast, killed apps.
fodkodrasz 1 hours ago [-]
False. The Metro design was abandoned long ago. No live tiles, no typography-first minimal UIs in windows 10/11. I pin an email app to taskbar/start, I don't see the unread count.
speed_spread 3 hours ago [-]
Ceylon, JVM language, developed by Red Hat, now abandoned at Eclipse. Lost the race with Kotlin but proposed more than just syntax sugar over Java. Anonymous union types, comprehensions, proper module system...
walterbell 11 hours ago [-]
Lotus Agenda, Ecco Pro and Chandler. 1980s AI-like human organization.
burnt-resistor 7 hours ago [-]
Fortress language. It suffered from being too Haskell-like in terms of too many, non-orthogonal features. Rust and Go applied lessons from it perhaps indirectly.
zem 3 hours ago [-]
their operator precedence system was one of my favourite pieces of language design. the tl;dr was that you could group operators into precedence sets, and an expression involving operators that all came from the same set would have that set's precedence rules applied, but if you had an expression involving mixed sets you needed to add the parentheses. crucially, they also supported operator overloading, and the same operator could be used in a different set as long as everything could be parsed unambiguously. (caveat, I never used the language, I just read about the operator design in the docs and it was very eye opening in the sense that every other language's operator precedence system suddenly felt crude and haphazard)
cmrdporcupine 5 hours ago [-]
Fortress had great ideas, but I'd say the closest thing to in the real world now might be Julia.
Gud 4 hours ago [-]
XMMS
pzo 11 hours ago [-]
Humane AI Pin. I think they launched 2 years too early and were too greedy with device pricing and subscription. Also if they focused as accessory for Android/iPhone they could reduce power usage and cost as well.
Their execution was of course bad but I think today current LLM models are better and faster and there is much more OSS models to reduce costs. Hardware though looked nice and pico projector interesting concept even though not the best executed.
Froedlich 8 hours ago [-]
Wine predates ReactOS. It was basically a FOSS duplicate of Sun's WABI.
I wrote a bunch of software in Borland Delphi, which ran in Windows, Wine, and ReactOS with no problems. Well, except for ReactOS' lack of printing support.
As long as you stay within the ECMA or published Windows APIs, everything runs fine in Wine and ReactOS. But Microsoft products are full of undocumented functions, as well as checks to see if they're running on real Windows. That goes back to the Windows 3.1 days, when 3.1 developers regularly used OS/2 instead of DOS, and Microsoft started adding patches to fail under OS/2 and DR-DOS. So all that has to be accounted for by Wine and ReactOS. A lot of third-party software uses undocumented functions as well, especially stuff written back during the days when computer magazines were a thing, and regularly published that kind of information. A lot of programmers found the lure of undocumented calls to be irresistible, and they wound up in all kinds of commercial applications where they really shouldn't have been.
In my experience anything that will load under Wine will run with no problems. ReactOS has some stability problems, but then the developers specifically call it "alpha" software. Despite that, I've put customers on ReactOS systems after verifying all their software ran on it. It gets them off the Microsoft upgrade treadmill. Sometimes there are compatibility problems and I fall back to Wine on Linux. Occasionally nothing will do but real Windows.
dheera 7 hours ago [-]
Hard disagree. The Humane AI Pin ad was a classic silicon valley ad that screamed B2VC and demonstrated nothing actually useful that couldn't be done with an all-in-one phone app (or even the ChatGPT app) and bluetooth earbuds that you already have.
Which reduces its innovation level to nothing more than a chest-mounted camera.
You want real B2C products that people would actually buy? Look at the Superbowl ads instead. Then watch the Humane ad again. It's laughable.
Jean-Philipe 4 hours ago [-]
ello.co - what a fun and pretty social media website that was.
lynx97 2 hours ago [-]
LSR, the "Linux Screen Reader", an ambitiousy designed Python implementation of a GUI screen reader developed by IBM starting around 2006 or so. The project was ended 2008 when IBM ended all its Accessibility involvement in FLOSS.
kurtis_reed 10 hours ago [-]
Meteor
vlasky 7 hours ago [-]
It's alive and well!
satisfice 6 hours ago [-]
Betamax. Because I bought a player and it gave better quality video.
People always fail to see something that is an inevitability. Humans lack foresight because they don't like change.
spooky_deep 3 hours ago [-]
At least with a smartphone it’s pretty clear when someone is filming you. Google Glass was too much of an enabler for creeps.
JMiao 4 hours ago [-]
nah, glass was impressive for a such a big org like google, but smartphones are popular because people use them like portable televisions. glanceable info and walking directions are more like an apple watch sized market, without the fashion element. meta is about to find out.
toast0 6 hours ago [-]
Google Wear is pretty much Google Glass on your wrist, so you don't burn out your eyes looking up and to the side.
nickthegreek 11 hours ago [-]
Wild that people would downvote your low stake personal opinion given as a direct ask from OP. I am 100% with you.
shikon7 7 hours ago [-]
Google Glass was so much before its time, it might be reinvented a few more times and abandoned again before finally becoming a success.
bdangubic 7 hours ago [-]
yea, crazy, I upvoted just now.
google glass sucks though and glasses will never be a thing. google and meta and … can spend $8T and come up with the most insane tech etc but no one will be wearing f’ing glasses :)
7 hours ago [-]
smileson2 5 hours ago [-]
USA
JimDabell 7 hours ago [-]
Apple’s scanning system for CSAM. The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked.
It was an extremely interesting effort where you could tell a huge amount of thought and effort went into making it as privacy-preserving as possible. I’m not convinced it’s a great idea, but it was a substantial improvement over what is in widespread use today and I wanted there to be a reasonable debate on it instead of knee-jerk outrage. But congrats, I guess. All the cloud hosting systems scan what they want anyway, and the one that was actually designed with privacy in mind got screamed out of existence by people who didn’t care to learn the first thing about it.
JoshTriplett 7 hours ago [-]
Good riddance to a system that would have provided precedent for client-side scanning for arbitrary other things, as well as likely false positives.
> I wanted there to be a reasonable debate on it
I'm reminded of a recent hit-piece about Chat Control, in which one of the proponent politicians was quoted as complaining about not having a debate. They didn't actually want a debate, they wanted to not get backlash. They would never have changed their minds, so there's no grounds for a debate.
We need to just keep making it clear the answer is "no", and hopefully strengthen that to "no, and perhaps the massive smoking crater that used to be your political career will serve as a warning to the next person who tries".
btown 7 hours ago [-]
This. No matter how cool the engineering might have been, from the perspective of what surveillance policies it would have (and very possibly did) inspire/set precedent for… Apple was very much creating the Torment Nexus from “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.”
JimDabell 7 hours ago [-]
> from the perspective of what surveillance policies it would have (and very possibly did) inspire/set precedent for…
I can’t think of a single thing that’s come along since that is even remotely similar. What are you thinking of?
I think it’s actually a horrible system to implement if you want to spy on people. That’s the point of it! If you wanted to spy on people, there are already loads of systems that exist which don’t intentionally make it difficult to do so. Why would you not use one of those models instead? Why would you take inspiration from this one in particular?
btown 4 hours ago [-]
The problem isn’t the system as implemented; the problem is the very assertion “it is possible to preserve the privacy your constituents want, while running code at scale that can detect Bad Things in every message.”
Once that idea appears, it allows every lobbyist and insider to say “mandate this, we’ll do something like what Apple did but for other types of Bad People” and all of a sudden you have regulations that force messaging systems to make this possible in the name of Freedom.
Remember: if a model can detect CSAM at scale, it can also detect anyone who possesses any politically sensitive image. There are many in politics for whom that level of control is the actual goal.
JimDabell 3 hours ago [-]
> The problem isn’t the system as implemented
Great!
> the problem is the very assertion “it is possible to preserve the privacy your constituents want, while running code at scale that can detect Bad Things in every message.”
Apple never made that assertion, and the system they designed is incapable of doing that.
> if a model can detect CSAM at scale, it can also detect anyone who possesses any politically sensitive image.
Apple’s system cannot do that. If you change parts of it, sure. But the system they proposed cannot.
To reiterate what I said earlier:
> The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked.
So far, you are saying that you don’t have a problem with the system Apple designed, and you do have a problem with some other design that Apple didn’t propose, that is significantly different in multiple ways.
Also, what do you mean by “model”? When I used the word “model” it was in the context of using another system as a model. You seem to be using it in the AI sense. You know that’s not how it worked, right?
JoshTriplett 6 hours ago [-]
> I can’t think of a single thing that’s come along since that is even remotely similar. What are you thinking of?
Chat Control, and other proposals that advocate backdooring individual client systems.
Clients should serve the user.
JimDabell 6 hours ago [-]
> Chat Control, and other proposals that advocate backdooring individual client systems.
Chat Control is older than Apple’s CSAM scanning and is very different from it.
> Clients should serve the user.
Apple’s system only scanned things that were uploaded to iCloud.
You missed the most important part of my comment:
> I think it’s actually a horrible system to implement if you want to spy on people. That’s the point of it! If you wanted to spy on people, there are already loads of systems that exist which don’t intentionally make it difficult to do so. Why would you not use one of those models instead? Why would you take inspiration from this one in particular?
JimDabell 7 hours ago [-]
I don’t think you can accurately describe it as client-side scanning and false positives were not likely. Depending upon how you view it, false positives were either extremely unlikely, or 100% guaranteed for practically everybody. And if you think the latter part is a problem, please read up on it!
> I'm reminded of a recent hit-piece about Chat Control, in which one of the proponent politicians was quoted as complaining about not having a debate. They didn't actually want a debate, they wanted to not get backlash. They would never have changed their minds, so there's no grounds for a debate.
Right, well I wanted a debate. And Apple changed their minds. So how is it reminding you of that? Neither of those things apply here.
mixmastamyk 4 hours ago [-]
Forgot about the concept of bugs have we? How about making Apple vulnerable to demands from every government where they do business?
No thanks. I'll take a hammer to any device in my vicinity that implements police scanning.
JimDabell 3 hours ago [-]
> Forgot about the concept of bugs have we?
No, but I have a hard time imagining a bug that would meaningfully compromise this kind of system. Can you give an example?
> How about making Apple vulnerable to demands from every government where they do business?
They already are. So are Google, Meta, Microsoft, and all the other giants we all use. And all those other companies are already scanning your stuff. Meta made two million reports in 2024Q4 alone.
drnick1 7 hours ago [-]
There is no place for spyware of any kind on my phone. Saying that it is to "protect the children" and "to catch terrorists" does not make it any more acceptable.
eimrine 1 hours ago [-]
Do you have any phones without spyware?
I believe my retro Nokia phones s60/s90 does not have any spyware. I believe earlier Nokia models like s40 or monochrome does not even have an ability to spy on me (but RMS considers triangulation as spyware). I don't believe any products from the duopoly without even root access are free from all kinds of vendor's rootkits.
eviks 3 hours ago [-]
> The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked.
But not very different to how it was actually going to work, as you say:
> If you change parts of it, sure.
Now try to reason your way out of the obvious "parts of it will definitely change" knee-jerk.
JimDabell 3 hours ago [-]
I’m not sure I’m understanding you.
Apple designed a system. People guessed at what it did. Their guesses were way off the mark. This poisoned all rational discussion on the topic. If you imagine a system that works differently to Apple’s system, you can complain about that imaginary system all you want, but it won’t be meaningful, it’s just noise.
eviks 3 hours ago [-]
You understand it just fine, you're just trying to pass you fantasy pod immutable safe future as rational while painting the obvious objections based on the real world as meaningless noise.
Rendered at 10:33:07 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
- MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together about how to install and configure things. Probably would have eased the tradition to mobile. A version was actually shipped to developers, but it had to be covered up to justify the bailout of Next by Apple to get Steve Jobs.
- Transaction processing operating systems. The first one was IBM's Customer Information Control System. A transaction processor is a kind of OS where everything is like a CGI program - load program, do something, exit program. Unix and Linux are, underneath, terminal oriented time sharing systems.
- IBM MicroChannel. Early minicomputer and microcomputer designers thought "bus", where peripherals can talk to memory and peripherals look like memory to the CPU. Mainframes, though, had "channels", simple processors which connected peripherals to the CPU. Channels could run simple channel programs, and managed device access to memory. IBM tried to introduce that with the PS2, but they made it proprietary and that failed in the marketplace. Today, everything has something like channels, but they're not a unified interface concept that simplifies the OS.
- CPUs that really hypervise properly. That is, virtual execution environments look just like real ones. IBM did that in VM, and it worked well because channels are a good abstraction for both a real machine and a VM. Storing into device registers to make things happen is not. x86 has added several layers below the "real machine" layer, and they're all hacks.
- The Motorola 680x0 series. Should have been the foundation of the microcomputer era, but it took way too long to get the MMU out the door. The original 68000 came out in 1978, but then Motorola fell behind.
- Modula. Modula 2 and 3 were reasonably good languages. Oberon was a flop. DEC was into Modula, but Modula went down with DEC.
- XHTML. Have you ever read the parsing rules for HTML 5, where the semantics for bad HTML were formalized? Browsers should just punt at the first error, display an error message, and render the rest of the page in Times Roman. Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly?
- Word Lens. Look at the world through your phone, and text is translated, standalone, on the device. No Internet connection required. Killed by Google in favor of hosted Google Translate.
XHTML appeals to the intuition that there should be a Strict Right Way To Do Things ... but you can't use that unforgiving framework for web documents that are widely shared.
The "real world" has 2 types of file formats:
(1) file types where consumers cannot contact/control/punish the authors (open-loop) : HTML, pdf, zip, csv, etc. The common theme is that the data itself is more important that the file format. That's why Adobe Reader will read malformed pdf files written by buggy PDF libraries. And both 7-Zip and Winrar can read malformed zip files with broken headers (because some old Java libraries wrote bad zip files). MS Excel can import malformed csv files. E.g. the Citi bank export to csv wrote a malformed file and it was desirable that MS Excel imported it anyway because the raw data of dollar amounts was more important than the incorrect commas in the csv file -- and -- I have no way of contacting the programmer at Citi to tell them to fix their buggy code that created the bad csv file.
(2) file types where the consumer can control the author (closed-loop): programming language source code like .c, .java, etc or business interchange documents like EDI. There's no need to have a "lenient forgiving" gcc/clang compiler to parse ".c" source code because the "consumer-and-author" will be the same person. I.e. the developer sees the compiler stop at a syntax error and then fix it and try to re-compile. For business interchange formats like EDI, a company like Walmart can tell the vendor to fix their broken EDI files.
XHTML wants to be in group (2) but web surfers can't control all the authors of .html so that's why lenient parsing of HTML "wins". XHTML would work better in a "closed-loop" environment such as a company writing internal documentation for its employees. E.g. an employee handbook can be written in strict XHTML because both the consumers and authors work at the same company. E.g. can't see the vacation policy because the XHTML syntax is wrong?!? Get on the Slack channel and tell the programmer or content author to fix it.
Amen. Postel’s Law was wrong:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9413
We stop at the first sign of trouble for almost every other format, we do not need lax parsing for HTML. This has caused a multitude of security vulnerabilities and only makes it more difficult for pretty much everybody.
The attitude towards HTML5 parsing seemed to grow out of this weird contrarianism that everybody who wanted to do better than whatever Internet Explorer did had their head in the clouds and that the role of a standard was just to write down all the bugs.
Meanwhile, local files with the .xhtml extension would be treated as XHTML. So everyone who tried to use XHTML didn't realize that it would go back to being read as HTML when they upload it to their webserver/return it from PHP/etc. Then, when something went wrong/worked differently than expected, the author would blame XHTML.
If you appreciate Modula's design, take a look at Nim[1].
I remember reading the Wikipedia page for Modula-3[2] and thinking "huh, that's just like Nim" in every other section.
[1] https://nim-lang.org
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-3
- I think without the move to NeXT, even if Jobs had come back to Apple, they would never have been able to get to the iPhone. iOS was - and still is - a unix-like OS, using unix-like philosophy, and I think that philosophy allowed them to build something game-changing compared to the SOTA in mobile OS technology at the time. So much so, Android follows suit. It doesn't have a command line, and installation is fine, so I'm not sure your line of reasoning holds strongly. One thing I think you might be hinting at though that is a missed trick: macOS today could learn a little from the way iOS and iPadOS is forced to do things and centralise configuration in a single place.
- I think transaction processing operating systems have been reinvented today as "serverless". The load/execute/quit cycle you describe is how you build in AWS Lambdas, GCP Cloud Run Functions or Azure Functions.
- Most of your other ideas (with an exception, see below), died either because of people trying to grab money rather than build cool tech, and arguably the free market decided to vote with its feet - I do wonder when we might next get a major change in hardware architectures again though, it does feel like we've now got "x86" and "ARM" and that's that for the next generation.
- XHTML died because it was too hard for people to get stuff done. The forgiving nature of the HTML specs is a feature, not a bug. We shouldn't expect people to be experts at reading specs to publish on the web, nor should it need special software that gatekeeps the web. It needs to be scrappy, and messy and evolutionary, because it is a technology that serves people - we don't want people to serve the technology.
Honestly I'm disappointed the promised XHTML5 never materialized along side HTML5. I guess it just lost steam.
It would kill the approachability of the language.
One of the joys of learning HTML when it tended to be hand-written was that if you made a mistake, you'd still see something just with distorted output.
That was a lot more approachable for a lot of people who were put off "real" programming languages because they were overwhelmed by terrible error messages any time they missed a bracket or misspelled something.
If you've learned to program in the last decade or two, you might not even realise just how bad compiler errors tended to be in most languages.
The kind of thing where you could miss a bracket on line 47 but end up with a compiler error complaining about something 20 lines away.
Rust ( in particular ) got everyone to bring up their game with respect to meaningful compiler errors.
But in the days of XHTML? Error messages were arcane, you had to dive in to see what the problem actually was.
What happens?
Even today, after years of better error messages, the strict validator at https://validator.w3.org/check says:
What is line 22? It's up to you to go hunting back through the document, to find the un-closed 'b' tag.Back in the day, the error messages were even more misleading than this, often talking about "Extra content at end of document" or similar.
Compare that to the very visual feedback of putting this exact document into a browser.
You get more bold text than you were expecting, the bold just runs into the next text.
That's a world of difference, especially for people who prefer visual feedback to reading and understanding errors in text form.
Try it for yourself, save this document to a .html file and put it through the XHTML validator.
Probably not, but what would be the benefit of having more pages fail to render? If xhtml had been coupled with some cool features which only worked in xhtml mode, it might have become successful, but on its own it does not provide much value.
I think those benefits are quite similar to having more programs failing to run (due to static and strong typing, other static analysis, and/or elimination of undefined behavior, for instance), or more data failing to be read (due to integrity checks and simply strict parsing): as a user, you get documents closer to valid ones (at least in the rough format), if anything at all, and additionally that discourages developers from shipping a mess. Then parsers (not just those in viewers, but anything that does processing) have a better chance to read and interpret those documents consistently, so even more things work predictably.
It is like Windows jumping through hoops to support backwards compatibility even with buggy software. The interest of the customer is that the software runs.
https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/
I still miss Macromedia Fireworks.
I agree on security and bugs, but bugs can be fixed. It just shows neglect by Adobe, which was, I think, the real problem. I think that if Adobe seriously wanted to, it could have been a web standard.
The 20 most common things you’d do with the tool were there for you in obvious toolbars. It had a lot of advanced features for image editing. It had a scripting language, so you could do bulk editing operations. It supported just about every file extension you could think of.
Most useful feature of all was that it’d load instantly. You’d click the icon on the desktop, and there’d be the Fireworks UI before you could finish blinking. Compared to 2025 Adobe apps, where you click the desktop icon and make a coffee while it starts, it’s phenomenal performance.
> TUNES started in 1992-95 as an operating system project, but was never clearly defined, and it succumbed to design-by-committee syndrome and gradually failed. Compared to typical OS projects it had very ambitious goals, which you may find interesting.
[1] http://tunes.org/
Edit: you asked why. I first saw it at SELF where Chris DiBona showed it to me and a close friend. It was awesome. Real time translation, integration of various types of messaging, tons of cool capabilities, and it was fully open source. What made it out of Google was a stripped down version of what I was shown, the market rejected it, and it was a sad day. Now, I am left with JIRA, Slack, and email. It sucks.
https://github.com/shano/Wave-ServerAdmin
It's been 16 years. I should probably archive this..
It make it seem needlessly complicated, and effectively erased all the positives.
In a sense Wave still exists but was split into multiple products, so I wouldn’t say it’s “dead”. The tech that powered it is still used today in many of Google’s popular products. It turns out that having separate interfaces for separate purposes is just more user friendly than an all-in-one.
Even the watered-down version of wave was something I used at my host startup, it was effectively our project management tool. And it was amazing at that.
I don't know how it would fare compared to the options available today, but back then, it shutting down was a tremendous loss.
VM's persist memory snapshots (as do Apple's containers, for macOS at least), so there's still room for something like that workflow.
The technology took decades to mature, but the business people didn’t have the patience to let the world catch up to this revolutionary technology.
Kinda, but for small writes it's still nowhere near.
Samsung 990 Pro - IOPS 4KQD1 113 MBytes/Sec
P4800X optane - IOPS 4KQD1 206 MBytes/Sec
And that's a device 5 years newer and on a faster pcie generation.
It disappeared because the market that values above attribute is too small and its hard to market because at first glance they look about the same on a lot of metrics as you say
We were about get rid of split between RAM and disk memory and use single stick for both!
Isn't windows fast boot something like that (only slower, depending on ssd)? It semi-hibernates, stores kernel part of memory on disk for faster startup.
Optane was nearly as fast as RAM, but also persistent like a storage device. So you do a suspend to RAM, without the requirement to keep it powered like a RAM.
A few more thoughts about that, since I happen to have some of the last systems who actually had systems level support for that in their firmware, and early low-capacity optanes designed for that sort of use. It's fascinating to play with these, but they are low capacity, and bound to obsolete operating systems.
Given enough RAM, you can emulate that with working suspend and resume to/and from RAM.
Another avenue are the ever faster and larger SSDs, in practice, with some models it makes almost no difference anymore, since random access times are so fast, and transfer speeds insane. Maybe total and/or daily TBW remains a concern.
Both of these can be combined.
Google Picasa: Everything local, so fast, so good. I'm never going to give my photos to G Photos.
Google Hangouts: Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps. I use Signal now.
Google G Suite Legacy: It was supposed to be free forever. They killed it, tried to make me pay. I migrated out of Google.
Google Play Music: I had uploaded thousands of MP3 files there. They killed it. I won't waste my time uploading again.
Google Finance: Tracked my stocks and funds there. Then they killed it. Won't trust them with my data again.
Google NFC Wallet: They killed it. Then Apple launched the same thing, and took over.
Google Chromecast Audio: It did one thing, which is all I needed. Sold mine as soon as they announced they were killing it.
Google Chromecast: Wait, they killed Chromecast? I did not know that until I started writing this..
Killing Google Reader affected a relatively small number of users, but these users disporportionately happened to be founders, CTOs, VPs of engineering, social media luminaries, and people who eventually became founders, CTOs, etc. They had been painfully taught to not trust Google, and, since that time, they didn't. And still don't.
They had a core set of ultra-connected users who touched key aspects of the entire tech industry. The knowledge graph you could have built out of what those people read and shared…
They could have just kept the entire service running with, what, 2 software engineers? Such a waste.
still have many domains on there, all with gmail
You can argue whether it's as good as GPM or not, but it's false to imply that your uploaded music disappeared when Google moved to YouTube Music. I made the transition, and all of my music moved without a new upload.
Unfortunately the last public version has a bug that randomly swaps face tags, so you end up training on the wrong persons faces just enough to throw it all off, and the recognition becomes effectively worthless on thousands of family photos. 8(
Digikam is a weak sauce replacement that barely gets the job done.
Google killed a lot of things to consolidate them into more "integrated" (from their perspective) product offerings. Picasa -> Photos, Hangounts -> Meet, Music -> YT Premium.
No idea what NFC Wallet was, other than the Wallet app on my phone that still exists and works?
The only one I'm not sure about is Chromecast - a while back my ones had an "update" to start using their newer AI Assistant system for managing it. Still works.
I also need to sell my Google Chromecast with Google TV 4K. Brand new, still in its shrink wrap. Bought it last year, to replace a flaky Roku. It was a flaky HDMI cable instead. I trust Roku more than Google for hardware support.
I genuinely thought all the chromecast audios I owned were useless bricks and was looking around for replacements and then they just started working again from an OTA update. Astounding. I assume someone got fired for taking time away from making search worse to do this.
(edit: https://www.techradar.com/televisions/streaming-devices/goog...)
Of course another question how long they will honor that commitment.
Is there another app where I can store this locally?
Using it on daily basis
The difference is they no longer store the data on their servers, it's stored on your phone (iPhone/Android)
https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6258979
That way, they can't respond to requests for that data by governments as they don't have it.
I can look on my phone and see all the places I've been today/yesterday, etc
Edit: Missed the "locally" part. Sorry no suggestions. Maybe Garmin has something?
https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522
I don't like the thought of providing Google thousands of personal photos for their AI training. Which will eventually leak to gov't agencies, fraudsters, and criminals.
Why didn’t you quit Google after, say, the third product you used got canned?
Hangouts had trouble scaling to many participants. Google Meet is fine, and better than e.g. MS Teams.
Legacy suite, free forever? Did they also promise a pony?..
Play Music: music is a legal minefield. Don't trust anybody commercial who suggests you upload music you did not write yourself.
Finance: IDK, I still get notifications about the stocks I'm interested in.
NFC Wallet: alive and kicking, I use it literally every day to pay for subway.
Can't say anything about Chromecast. I have a handful of ancient Chromecasts that work. I don't want any updates for them.
Then all those sites I used to post on stopped supporting rss one by one and finally pipes was killed off.
For a while I used a python library called riko that did the same thing as pipes without the visual editor. I have to thank it for getting me off php and into python.
https://github.com/nerevu/riko
It has the advantage of being open source, has well defined and stable APIs and a solid backend. Plus 10+ years of constant development with many learnings around how to implement flow based programming visually.
I used the Node-RED frontend to create Browser-Red[^2] which is a Node-RED that solely executes in the browser, no server required. It does not support all Node-RED functionality but gives a good feel for using Node-RED and flow based programming.
The second project with which I am using Node-RED frontend is Erlang-Red[^3] which is Node-RED with an Erlang backend. Erlang is better suited to flow based programming than NodeJS, hence this attempt to demonstrate that!
Node-RED makes slightly different assumptions than Yahoo! Pipes - input ports being the biggest: all nodes in Node-RED have either zero or one input wires, nodes in Yahoo! Pipes had multiple input wires.
A good knowledge of jQuery is required but that makes it simpler to get into the frontend code - would be my argument ;) I am happy to answer questions related to Node-RED, email in bio.
[^1]: https://nodered.org
[^2]: https://cdn.flowhub.org
[^3]: https://github.com/gorenje/erlang-red
Apache Karavan: https://karavan.space/ Kaoto (Red Hat): https://kaoto.io
Both are end 2 end usable within vscode.
I don't know if it was Yahoo Pipes that died, or a mainstream internet based on open protocols and standards.
https://www.mashups.io
The creator, kentonv (on HN), commented about it recently here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44848099
10+ years ago I'd regularly build all sorts of little utilities with it. It was surprisingly easy to use it to tap into things that are otherwise a lot more work. For instance I used it to monitor the data coming from a USB device. Like 3 nodes and 3 patches to make all of that work. Working little GUI app in seconds.
Apple hasn't touched it since 2016, I kind of hope it makes a comeback given Blender and more so Unreal Engine giving people a taste of the node based visual programming life.
You can still download it from Apple, and it still technically works but a lot of the most powerful nodes are broken in the newer OS's. I'd love to see the whole thing revitalized.
Crazy fast compiler so doesn't frustrate trial & erroring students, decent type system without the wildness of say rust and all the basic programming building blocks you want students to grasp are present without language specific funkiness.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin
I was a hold out on smartphones for a while and I used to print out k5 articles to read while afk... Just such an amazing collection of people sharing ideas and communal moderation, editing and up voting.
I learned about so many wierd and wonderful things from that site.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_%28operating_system%29
I've heard someone at Microsoft describe it as a moonshot but also a retention project; IIRC it had a hundred plus engineers on it at one time, including a lot of very senior people.
Apparently a bunch of research from Midori made it into .NET so it wasn't all lost, but still...
Never heard this phrase before, but I can definitely see this happening at companies of that size
The internet before advertising, artificial intelligence, social media and bots. When folks created startups in their bedrooms or garages. The days when google slogan was “don’t be evil”.
Communities are moving back to early Internet-like chatrooms like IRC, but now it is Slack, Discord, and the like. Everything private.
I don't like the siloing our information to Discord being a comparison to old internet. We had indexable information in forums that is "lost", not in the literal sense, but because you wouldn't be able to find it without obsessive digging to find it again. Conversations in Discord communities are very surface level and cyclical because it's far less straight forward to keep track of and link to answers from last week let alone two years ago. It is profoundly sad, to be honest.
Animated gifs of cat, banner bars and pixels cost one dollar, until a one million were sold.
And it all ran on Chuck Norris' personal computer.
I often wonder, if AI had come 15 years earlier, would it have been a ton better because there weren't a billion different ways to do things? Would we have ever bothered to come up with all the different tech, if AI was just chugging through features efficiently, with consistent training data etc.?
Sounds not that different from containers, if you just choose the most popular tooling.
Small projects: docker compose, posgres, redis, nginx
Big projects: kubernetes, posgres, redis, nginx
This is why Heroku lost popularity.
- not lowering prices as time went off. They probably kept a super-huger margin profit, but they’re largely irrelevant today
- not building their own datacenters and staying in aws. That would have allowed them to lower prices and gain even more market share. Everyone that has been in amazon/aws likely has seen the internal market rate for ec2 instances and know there’s a HUGE profit margin deriving by building datacenters. Add the recent incredible improvements to compute density (you can easily get 256c/512t and literally terabytes of memory in a 2u box) and you get basically an infinite money glitch.
tumblr will practically let you do that for chrissake
I’m not arguing the solutions it outlined are good, but I think some more discussion around how we interact with touch screens would be needed. Instead, we are still typing on a layout that was invented for mechanical typewriters - in 2025, on our touch screens.
https://youtu.be/zWz1KbknIZk?si=LWGsLQjFTWBOvzN-
This would have changed so much. Desktop apps powered by the engine of Firefox not Chrome.
Why? Not enough company buy in, not enough devs worked on it. Maybe developed before a major Firefox re-write?
Full C# instead of god forbidden js.
Full vector dpi aware UI, with grid, complex animation, and all other stuff that html5/css didn’t have in 2018 but silverlight had even in 2010 (probable even earlier).
MVVM pattern, two-way bindings. Expression Blend (basically figma) that allowed designers create UI that was XAML, had sample data, and could be used be devs as is with maybe some cleanup.
Excellent tooling, static analysis, debugging, what have you.
Rendered and worked completely the same in any browser (safari, ie, chrome, opera, firefox) on mac and windows
If that thing still worked, boy would we be in a better place regarding web apps.
Unfortunately, iPhone killed adobe flash and Silverlight as an aftermath. Too slow processor, too much energy consumption.
Why do you think JavaScript is a problem? And a big enough problem to risk destroying open web standards.
TypeScript exists for the same reason things like mypy exists, and no one in their right mind claims that python's openness should be threatened just because static typing is convenient.
Stuff like angularjs was basically created for the same reason flash/silverlight went down — iphone
> A remote code execution vulnerability exists when Microsoft Silverlight decodes strings using a malicious decoder that can return negative offsets that cause Silverlight to replace unsafe object headers with contents provided by an attacker. In a web-browsing scenario, an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could obtain the same permissions as the currently logged-on user. If a user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker could take complete control of the affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security-updates/securityb...
Lots of their stuff was delivered as Silverlight apps. It turns out that getting office workers to install a blessed plugin from Microsoft and navigate to a web page is much easier than distributing binaries that you have to install and keep up to date. And developing for it was pure pleasure; you got to use C# and Visual Studio, and a GUI interface builder, rather than the Byzantine HTML/JS/CSS ecosystem.
I get why it never took off, but in this niche of small-time custom software it was really way nicer than anything else that existed at the time. Web distribution combined with classic desktop GUI development.
It has been in existence in some form or another for nearly 30 years, but did not gain the traction it needed and as of writing it's still not in a usable state on real hardware. It's not abandoned, but progress on it is moving so slow that I doubt we'll ever see it be released in a state that's useful for real users.
It's too bad, because a drop in Windows replacement would be nice for all the people losing Windows 10 support right now.
On the other hand, I think people underestimate the difficulty involved in the project and compare it unfavorably to Linux, BSD, etc. Unix and its source code was pretty well publicly documented and understood for decades before those projects started, nothing like that ever really existed for Windows.
Some projects creep along slowly until something triggers an interest and suddenly they leap ahead.
MAME's Tandy 2000 implementation was unusable, until someone found a copy of Windows 1.0 for the Tandy 2000, then the emulation caught up until Windows ran.
Maybe ReactOS will get a big influx of activity after Windows 10 support goes offline in a couple days, or even shortly after when you can't turn AI spying off, not even three times a year.
And yet, no big leap in ReactOS (at least for now).
It was a series of experiments with new approaches to programming. Kind of reminded me of the research that gave us Smalltalk. It would have been interesting to see where they went with it, but they wound down the project.
And that's precisely why companies nerf their web sites and put a little popup that says "<service> works better on the app".
Apple would have inevitably done their own thing, but it would have been really nice to have two widely used, mature and open mobile Linux platforms.
- Based on BitTorrent ideas
- Completely decentralized websites' code and data
- Either completely decentralized or controllable-decentralized authentication
- Could be integrated into existing websites (!)
It's not kind of dead, there's a supported fork, but it still feels like a revolution that did not happen. It works really well.
In 2011, before TypeScript, Next.js or even React, they had seamless server-client code, in a strongly typed functional language with support for features like JSX-like inline HTML, async/await, string interpolation, built-in MongoDB ORM, CSS-in-JS, and many syntax features that were added to ECMAScript since then.
I find it wild how this project was 90%+ correct on how we will build web apps 14 years later.
https://non.tuxfamily.org
I used it quite a bit to produce radio shows for my country's public broadcasting. Because Non's line-oriented session format was so easy to parse with classic Unix tools, I wrote a bunch of scripts for it with Awk etc. (E.g. calculating the total length of clips highlighted with brown color in the DAW -- which was stuff meant for editing out; or creating a poor man's "ripple editing" feature by moving loosely-placed clips precisely side by side; or, eventually, converting the sessions to Samplitude EDL format, and, from there, to Pro Tools via AATranslator [1] (because our studio was using PT), etc. Really fun times!)
1: https://aatranslator.com.au/
It looked a bit goofy in the promo videos, but under the hood it was doing real-time chord detection and accompaniment generation. Basically a prototype of what AI music tools like Suno, Udio, or Mubert are doing today, fifteen years too early.
If Microsoft had kept iterating on it with modern ML models, it could’ve become the "GarageBand for ideas that start as a hum."
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara
It's at a very early stage of development but looks promising
There are lots of competing MLs you can use instead:
- F# (Fable)
- ReasonML
- OCaml (Bucklescript)
- Haskell
- PureScript
IMO the problem with Elm was actually The Elm Architecture.
https://guide.elm-lang.org/architecture/
I'm no frontend guy, but I think it did/was inspire(d) react (redux?) maybe. Corrections on this very welcome
Instead it went chasing markets, abandoning existing users as it did so, in favour of potential larger pools of users elsewhere. In the end it failed to find a niche going forward while leaving a trail of abandoned niches behind it.
Luckily it wasn't long after Mozilla abandoned it that PWAs were introduced and I could port the apps I cared about.
That’s actually an incredibly cool concept.
I noticed the trend when I was working on a major web property for the Aditya Birla conglomerate. My whole team was pleasantly surprised, and we made sure to test everything in Firefox for that project. But everyone switched to Android + Chrome over the next few years, which was a shame.
Today, India is 90% Chrome :(
Interesting how Flash became the almost universal way to play videos in the browser, in the latter half of the 2000's (damn I'm old...).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Edge
I wonder why one one has managed to build something comparable that does work on a phone.
Maybe they could have fixed all that for touch screens, small portrait screens, and more but they never did make it responsive AFAIK.
Are you referring to the SWF file format?
A genius product ripped my Microsoft. Have you used Microsoft Teams recently? Bad UI, hard to configure external hardware and good level of incompatibility, missing the good old "Echo / Sound Test Service". At a point I even installed Skype of my old Android but was sucking up too much battery.
1. competing visions for how the entire system should work
2. dependence on early/experimental npm libraries
3. devs breaking existing features due to "innovation"
4. a lot of interpersonal drama because it was not just open source but also a social network
the ideas are really good, someone should make the project again and run with it
It was a fascinating protocol underneath, but the social follow structure seemed to select strongly for folks who already had a following or something.
Having seen what goes on in the foss world and what goes on in the large faang-size corporate world, no wonder the corporate world is light-years ahead.
[1] https://austral-lang.org/ [2] https://austral-lang.org/spec/spec.html
Edit: in fact I'd say they were irrelevant before pretty much all of those innovations. By the time AIM or MSN Messenger really became popular, ICQ didn't matter anymore.
People talk so much about how you need to write code that fits well within the rest of the codebase, but what tools do we have to explore codebases and see what is connected to what? Clicking through files feels kind of stupid because if you have to work with changes that involve 40 files, good luck keeping any of that in your working memory. In my experience, the JetBrains dependency graphs also aren't good enough.
Sourcetrail was a code visualization tool that allowed you to visualize those dependencies and click around the codebase that way, see what methods are connected to what and so on, thanks to a lovely UI. I don't think it was enough alone, but I absolutely think we need something like this: https://www.dbvis.com/features/database-management/#explore-... but for your code, especially for codebases with hundreds of thousands or like above a million SLoC.
Example: https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail/blob/master/doc...
Another example: https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail/blob/master/doc...
I yearn to some day view entire codebases as graphs with similarly approachable visualization, where all the dependencies are highlighted when I click an element. This could also go so, so much further - you could have a debugger breakpoint set and see the variables at each place, alongside being able to visually see how code is called throughout the codebase, or hell, maybe even visualize every possible route that could be taken.
The idea that you could read and write data at RAM speeds was really exciting to me. At work it's very common to see microscope image sets anywhere from 20 to 200 GB and file transfer rates can be a big bottleneck.
Archive capture circa 2023: https://web.archive.org/web/20230329173623/https://ddramdisk...
HN post from 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35195029
What to do with it, once it's there, is a concern of software, but specialized hardware is needed to get it there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zram
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Zram
for most purposes. (Assuming the host has enough RAM to spare, to begin with)
Connect your phone to a display, mouse, keyboard and get a full desktop experience.
At the time smartphones were not powerful enough, cables were fiddly (adapters, HDMI, USB A instead of a single USB c cable) and virtualization and containers not quite there.
Today, going via pkvm seems like promising approach. Seamless sharing of data, apps etc. will take some work, though.
If something like that existed today, powered by modern APIs and AI, it could become the ultimate no-code creativity playground.
(For those unfamiliar, Illustrator is a pure vector graphics editor; once you rasterize its shapes, they become uneditable fixed bitmaps. Fireworks was a vector graphics editor that rendered at a constant DPI, so it basically let you edit raster bitmaps like they were vectors. It was invaluable for pixel-perfect graphic design. Nothing since lets you do that, though with high-DPI screens and resolution-independent UIs being the norm these days, this functionality is less relevant than it used to be.)
Just barely stopped using my CS6 copy. Still haven't found anything as intuitive.
Also this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6676494
Redmart (Singapore): Best web based online store to this date (obviously personal view). No one even tries now that mobile apps have won.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/01/alibaba-lazada-redmart-con...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5wAn-4e5hQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWsNFVvblLw
Summary:
>This presentation introduces Via, a virtual file system designed to address the challenges of large game downloads and storage. Unlike cloud gaming, which suffers from poor image quality, input latency, and high hosting costs, Via allows games to run locally while only downloading game data on demand. The setup process is demonstrated with Halo Infinite, showing a simple installation that involves signing into Steam and allocating storage space for Via's cache.
>Via creates a virtual Steam library, presenting all owned games as installed, even though their data is not fully downloaded. When a game is launched, Via's virtual file system intercepts requests and downloads only the necessary game content as it's needed. This on-demand downloading is integrated with the game's existing streaming capabilities, leveraging features like level-of-detail and asset streaming. Performance metrics are displayed, showing download rates, server ping, and disk commit rates, illustrating how Via fetches data in real-time.
>The system prioritizes caching frequently accessed data. After an initial download, subsequent play sessions benefit from the on-disk cache, significantly reducing or eliminating the need for network downloads. This means the actual size of a game becomes less relevant, as only a portion of it needs to be stored locally. While server locations are currently limited, the goal is to establish a global network to ensure low ping. The presentation concludes by highlighting Via's frictionless user experience, aiming for a setup so seamless that users are unaware of its presence. Via is currently in early access and free to use, with hopes of future distribution partnerships.
I'm amazed the video still has under 4,000 views. Sadly, Flaherty got hired by XAI and gave up promoting the project.
https://x.com/rflaherty71/status/1818668595779412141
But I could see the technology behind it working wonders for Steam, Game Pass, etc.
I don't see how this could take off. Internet speeds are getting quicker, disk space is getting cheaper, and this will slow down load times. And what's worse is the more you need this tech the worse experience you have.
Just on principle, I'd have liked to see it on the market for more than 49 days! It pains me as an engineer to think of the effort to bring a hardware device to market for such a minuscule run.
At its best, having IM, email, browser, games, keywords, chats, etc. was a beautiful idea IMO. That they were an ISP seemed secondary or even unrelated to the idea. But they chose to charge for access even in the age of broadband, and adopt gym level subscription tactics to boot, and people decided they'd rather not pay it which is to be expected. I often wonder if they'd have survived as a software company otherwise.
They were basically a better thought out Facebook before Facebook, in my opinion.
You could purposely choose to be online or offline.
Much easier to draw a line back then about how often you were online.
Unfortunately, it died because its very niche and also they couldnt keep up with development of drivers for desktops.. This is even worse today...
What was the bookmarks social tool called from 00’s? I loved it and it fell off the earth. You could save your bookmarks, “publish” them to the community, share etc..
What ever happened to those build your own homepage apps like startpage (I think)? I always thought those would take off
del.icio.us! Funnily, also killed by yahoo like flickr
Died due to legal wranglings about patents, iirc.
More here:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45061680
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGoogle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop
and why? = UI/UX
i first learned about it when i was working in an university group and had the task to transform a windowing algorithm already working on matlab to python. it felt like a modern linter and lsp with additional support through machine learning. i don't quite know why it got comparative small recognition, but perhaps enough to remain an avantgarde pioneering both python and machine learning support for further generations and wider applications.
http://opalang.org/
I think the market was still skeptical about nodejs on the server at the time but other than that I don’t really know why it didn’t take off
That said, frameworks were all the buzz back in the day, so the language alone probably wouldn't have gone anywhere without it.
All of the upside and none of the downside of react
No JSX and no compiler, all native js
The main dev is paid by microsoft to do oss rust nowadays
I use choo for my personal projects and have used it twice professionally
https://github.com/choojs/choo#example
The example is like 25 lines and introduces all the concepts
Less moving parts than svelte
For example, Haunted is a react hooks implementation for lit: https://github.com/matthewp/haunted
Choo suffered from not having an ecosystem, same with mithtil and other "like react but not" also-rans.
(Not the Linux distribution with the same name)
I have used it for years.
A two pane manager, it makes defining file associations, applications invoked by extensions and short cut buttons easy convenient.
Sadly it is abandonware now.
Slowly migrating to Double Commander now...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuala
I kind of expect we might see something similar if the AI bubble pops
I wonder who owns the domain now
Why? Obviously close-to-zero market. It was unbelievable how those people though those projects would even succeed.
Dual screen iPad killer, productivity optimised. IIRC Microsoft OneNote is its only legacy.
Killed because both the Windows team and the Office team thought it was stepping on their toes.
In the end I wound up with basically the same application software as on my Debian desktop, except running on Haiku instead of Linux. Haiku is noticeably snappier and more responsive than Linux+X+Qt+KDE, though.
Looked cool during demos. Got killed when Flash died.
ISO/OSI had session layer. ie much of what QUIC does regarding underlying multiple transports.
Speaking of X.509 the s-expressions certificate format was more interesting in many ways.
X.400 was a nice idea, but the ideal of having a single global directory predates security. I can understand why it never happened
On X.509, the spec spends two chapters on attribute certificates, which I've never seen used in the wild. It's a shame; identity certificates do a terrible job at authentication
1. When Windows Vista was being developed, there were plans to replace the file system with a database, allowing users to organize and search for files using database queries. This was known as WinFS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS). I was looking forward to this in the mid-2000s. Unfortunately Vista was famously delayed, and in an attempt to get Vista released, Microsoft pared back features, and one of these features was WinFS. Instead of WinFS, we ended up getting improved file search capabilities. It's unfortunate that there's been no proposals for database file systems for desktop operating systems since.
2. OpenDoc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc) was an Apple technology from the mid-1990s that promoted component-based software. Instead of large, monolithic applications such as Microsoft Excel and Adobe Photoshop, functionality would be offered in the form of components, and users and developers can combine these components to form larger solutions. For example, as an alternative to Adobe Photoshop, there would be a component for the drawing canvas, and there would be separate components for each editing feature. Components can be bought and sold on an open marketplace. It reminds me of Unix pipes, but for GUIs. There's a nice promotional video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFJdjk2rq4E.
OpenDoc was a radically different paradigm for software development and distribution, and I think this was could have been an interesting contender against the dominance that Microsoft and Adobe enjoys in their markets. OpenDoc actually did ship, and there were some products made using OpenDoc, most notably Apple's Cyberdog browser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog).
Unfortunately, Apple was in dire straits in the mid-1990s. Windows 95 was a formidable challenger to Mac OS, and cheaper x86 PCs were viable alternatives to Macintosh hardware. Apple was an acquisition target; IBM and Apple almost merged, and there was also an attempt to merge Apple with Sun. Additionally, the Macintosh platform depended on the availability of software products like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, the very types of products that OpenDoc directly challenged. When Apple purchased NeXT in December 1996, Steve Jobs returned to Apple, and all work on OpenDoc ended not too long afterward, leading to this now-famous exchange during WWDC 1997 between Steve Jobs and an upset developer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o).
I don't believe that OpenDoc fits in with Apple's business strategy, even today, and while Microsoft offers component-based technologies that are similar to OpenDoc (OLE, COM, DCOM, ActiveX, .NET), the Windows ecosystem is still dominated by monolithic applications.
I think it would have been cool had the FOSS community pursued component-based software. It would have been really cool to apt-get components from remote repositories and link them together, either using GUI tools, command-line tools, or programmatically to build custom solutions. Instead, we ended up with large, monolithic applications like LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, etc.
3. I am particularly intrigued by Symbolics Genera (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system)), an operating system designed for Symbolics Lisp machines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics). In Genera, everything is a Lisp object. The interface is an interesting hybrid of early GUIs and the command line. To me, Genera could have been a very interesting substrate for building component-based software; in fact, it would have been far easier building OpenDoc on top of Common Lisp than on top of C or C++. Sadly, Symbolics' fortunes soured after the AI winter of the late 1980s/early 1990s, and while Genera was ported to other platforms such as the DEC Alpha and later the x86-64 via the creation of a Lisp machine emulator, it's extremely difficult for people to obtain a legal copy, and it was never made open source. The closest things to Genera we have are Xerox Interlisp, a competing operating system that was recently made open source, and open-source descendants of Smalltalk-80: Squeak, Pharo, and Cuis-Smalltalk.
4. Apple's "interregnum" years between 1985 and 1996 were filled with many intriguing projects that were either never commercialized, were cancelled before release, or did not make a splash in the marketplace. One of the most interesting projects during the era was Bauhaus, a Lisp operating system developed for the Newton platform. Mikel Evins, a regular poster here, describes it here (https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-07-12-reimagining-ba...). It would have been really cool to have a mass-market Lisp operating system, especially if it had the same support for ubiquitous dynamic objects like Symbolic Genera.
MIME types for mail addressed much of the demand for pluggable data types.
Javascript/HTML based smartphone / app interface.
Instead it went into a slow death spiral due to Windows 95.
Got a good family story about that whole acquisition attempt, but I don't want to speak publicly on behalf of my uncle. I know we've talked at length about the what-ifs of that moment.
I do have a scattering of some neat Quarterdeck memorabilia I can share, though:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/0ca1omn2kwda9op5go34e/ACpO6bz...
But you couldn't actually buy /X. After trying to buy a copy, my publisher even contacted DESQ's marketing people to get a copy for me, and they wouldn't turn one over. Supposedly there were some copies actually sold, but too few, too late, and then /X was dropped. There was at least one more release of plain DESQview after that, but by then Windows was eating its lunch.
They stopped supporting small tablets some years ago though, and made it worse with every Windows update. I can only surmise that it was to make people stop using them. Slow GUI, low contrast, killed apps.
Their execution was of course bad but I think today current LLM models are better and faster and there is much more OSS models to reduce costs. Hardware though looked nice and pico projector interesting concept even though not the best executed.
I wrote a bunch of software in Borland Delphi, which ran in Windows, Wine, and ReactOS with no problems. Well, except for ReactOS' lack of printing support.
As long as you stay within the ECMA or published Windows APIs, everything runs fine in Wine and ReactOS. But Microsoft products are full of undocumented functions, as well as checks to see if they're running on real Windows. That goes back to the Windows 3.1 days, when 3.1 developers regularly used OS/2 instead of DOS, and Microsoft started adding patches to fail under OS/2 and DR-DOS. So all that has to be accounted for by Wine and ReactOS. A lot of third-party software uses undocumented functions as well, especially stuff written back during the days when computer magazines were a thing, and regularly published that kind of information. A lot of programmers found the lure of undocumented calls to be irresistible, and they wound up in all kinds of commercial applications where they really shouldn't have been.
In my experience anything that will load under Wine will run with no problems. ReactOS has some stability problems, but then the developers specifically call it "alpha" software. Despite that, I've put customers on ReactOS systems after verifying all their software ran on it. It gets them off the Microsoft upgrade treadmill. Sometimes there are compatibility problems and I fall back to Wine on Linux. Occasionally nothing will do but real Windows.
Which reduces its innovation level to nothing more than a chest-mounted camera.
You want real B2C products that people would actually buy? Look at the Superbowl ads instead. Then watch the Humane ad again. It's laughable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat
People always fail to see something that is an inevitability. Humans lack foresight because they don't like change.
google glass sucks though and glasses will never be a thing. google and meta and … can spend $8T and come up with the most insane tech etc but no one will be wearing f’ing glasses :)
It was an extremely interesting effort where you could tell a huge amount of thought and effort went into making it as privacy-preserving as possible. I’m not convinced it’s a great idea, but it was a substantial improvement over what is in widespread use today and I wanted there to be a reasonable debate on it instead of knee-jerk outrage. But congrats, I guess. All the cloud hosting systems scan what they want anyway, and the one that was actually designed with privacy in mind got screamed out of existence by people who didn’t care to learn the first thing about it.
> I wanted there to be a reasonable debate on it
I'm reminded of a recent hit-piece about Chat Control, in which one of the proponent politicians was quoted as complaining about not having a debate. They didn't actually want a debate, they wanted to not get backlash. They would never have changed their minds, so there's no grounds for a debate.
We need to just keep making it clear the answer is "no", and hopefully strengthen that to "no, and perhaps the massive smoking crater that used to be your political career will serve as a warning to the next person who tries".
I can’t think of a single thing that’s come along since that is even remotely similar. What are you thinking of?
I think it’s actually a horrible system to implement if you want to spy on people. That’s the point of it! If you wanted to spy on people, there are already loads of systems that exist which don’t intentionally make it difficult to do so. Why would you not use one of those models instead? Why would you take inspiration from this one in particular?
Once that idea appears, it allows every lobbyist and insider to say “mandate this, we’ll do something like what Apple did but for other types of Bad People” and all of a sudden you have regulations that force messaging systems to make this possible in the name of Freedom.
Remember: if a model can detect CSAM at scale, it can also detect anyone who possesses any politically sensitive image. There are many in politics for whom that level of control is the actual goal.
Great!
> the problem is the very assertion “it is possible to preserve the privacy your constituents want, while running code at scale that can detect Bad Things in every message.”
Apple never made that assertion, and the system they designed is incapable of doing that.
> if a model can detect CSAM at scale, it can also detect anyone who possesses any politically sensitive image.
Apple’s system cannot do that. If you change parts of it, sure. But the system they proposed cannot.
To reiterate what I said earlier:
> The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked.
So far, you are saying that you don’t have a problem with the system Apple designed, and you do have a problem with some other design that Apple didn’t propose, that is significantly different in multiple ways.
Also, what do you mean by “model”? When I used the word “model” it was in the context of using another system as a model. You seem to be using it in the AI sense. You know that’s not how it worked, right?
Chat Control, and other proposals that advocate backdooring individual client systems.
Clients should serve the user.
Chat Control is older than Apple’s CSAM scanning and is very different from it.
> Clients should serve the user.
Apple’s system only scanned things that were uploaded to iCloud.
You missed the most important part of my comment:
> I think it’s actually a horrible system to implement if you want to spy on people. That’s the point of it! If you wanted to spy on people, there are already loads of systems that exist which don’t intentionally make it difficult to do so. Why would you not use one of those models instead? Why would you take inspiration from this one in particular?
> I'm reminded of a recent hit-piece about Chat Control, in which one of the proponent politicians was quoted as complaining about not having a debate. They didn't actually want a debate, they wanted to not get backlash. They would never have changed their minds, so there's no grounds for a debate.
Right, well I wanted a debate. And Apple changed their minds. So how is it reminding you of that? Neither of those things apply here.
No thanks. I'll take a hammer to any device in my vicinity that implements police scanning.
No, but I have a hard time imagining a bug that would meaningfully compromise this kind of system. Can you give an example?
> How about making Apple vulnerable to demands from every government where they do business?
They already are. So are Google, Meta, Microsoft, and all the other giants we all use. And all those other companies are already scanning your stuff. Meta made two million reports in 2024Q4 alone.
I believe my retro Nokia phones s60/s90 does not have any spyware. I believe earlier Nokia models like s40 or monochrome does not even have an ability to spy on me (but RMS considers triangulation as spyware). I don't believe any products from the duopoly without even root access are free from all kinds of vendor's rootkits.
But not very different to how it was actually going to work, as you say:
> If you change parts of it, sure.
Now try to reason your way out of the obvious "parts of it will definitely change" knee-jerk.
Apple designed a system. People guessed at what it did. Their guesses were way off the mark. This poisoned all rational discussion on the topic. If you imagine a system that works differently to Apple’s system, you can complain about that imaginary system all you want, but it won’t be meaningful, it’s just noise.